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Prolegomena to ethics, by '"je late Thoma
3 1924 014 673 762
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PROLEGOMENA TO ETHICS
BY THE LATE
THOMAS HILL GREEN, M.A., LL.D.
FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE
AND WHYTe'S professor OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
EDITED BY
A. C. BRADLEY, M.A.
FORMERLY FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE AND PROFESSOR OF POETRY
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
FIFTH EDITION
WITH A PREFACE BY
E. CAIRD, M.A., Hon. D.C.L.
MASTER OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1906
HENRY FROWDE, M.A.
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
LONDON, EDINBURGH
NEW YORK AND TORONTO
-PREi^ACE T(| THE FIFTH EDITION
I HAVE been asked to say a few words of Preface to
the new and cheaper edition of Green's Prolegomena, the
merits of which as an introduction to Ethics are generally
recognised. The Prolegomena may be described as a
new treatment of the fundamental questions of Ethics,
from an idealistic point of view, somewhat modified from
that of Kant. The problem from which Green, like
Kant, starts is the apparent opposition between the
ordinary conception of the world, as a system of causally
connected objects in space and time, which is presupposed
by physical science, and what seem to be the fundamental
ideas of morality and religion, the ideas of God, freedom,
and immortality. If man, like all the other objects of
our empirical knowledge, is merely one part of the world
of objects which act and react upon each other, according
to fixed general laws, what room is left for the assertion
of his moral freedom, or for any higher destiny which
distinguishes him from the other creatures ? and how can
we regard him as other than a conditioned finite being,
a link in the chain of conditioned being, or as having
a direct living relation to a God who is regarded not as
a part, but as the principle, source, and end of the whole
system ? Morality and religion seem to attribute to man
an individual independence, and a relation to the abso-
lute Being which no merely finite object could possess.
If we follow out the ordinary methods of physical science,
we seem reduced either te deny the moral responsibility
of man and the existence ©f God, or to assert both on
grounds which we should not admit in any other case.
iv PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION
Now Green, like Kant, endeavours to show that in
ordinary experience and in physical science we usually
ignore or abstract from a principle which, nevertheless,
is always present in all our knowledge, and that there-
fore such science does not deal with the ultimate reality
of things, but only with phenomena ; i. e. with things
partially understood, or not apprehended in their whole
reality. When, however, we detect this principle in re-
lation to which all phenomena exist and are known, the
result is both to vindicate the ways of knowing that
characterise science and ordinary experience within their
proper sphere, and at the same time to establish our
right, to apply the principles of morality and religion
to the absolute reality. Hence, our ordinary experience
and science rest upon a principle which, when recognised,
carries us beyond such experience and science. Kant,
indeed, maintains that it does not do this in the way
of knowledge, but only opens the way for a faith which
may guide us in practice. It can, in his view, prevent
us from conceiving our experience as more than a know-
ledge of phenomena, but cannot enable us to change
such partial knowledge into an apprehension of the real
nature of things. Green, on the contrary, holds that
when we see phenomenal objects in relation to their
principles, we acquire a knowledge of what they are in
themselves. Both, however, agree that our moral con-
sciousness does take account of that principle, and that,
as a consequence, we are entitled to postulate the moral
freedom of man, and the existence of God, as primary
truths on which we can base our existence as spiritual
beings, And Green endeavours to work out the con-
sequences of these principles in relation to morality.
In the Second Book of the Prolegomena, therefore, he
treats man's practical life as a realisation of freedom, and
PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION y
endeavours to show in what sense freedom is realised,
firstly, in man's action generally ; and secondly, in
a narrower sense, in actions that are morally good.
What is meant by saying that man is free in all his
practical activity ? and what is meant by saying that he
is free only when his action conforms to the moral ideal ?
The first question is answered by showing that all action
from motive is essentially free or self-determined action ;
the second, by showing that man is truly realising himself
only when the motive of his action is the moral ideal.
The moral ideal, it is then contended, is not truly re-
presented by Hedonism as the sum of pleasures, either
for the individual, or ' the greatest number '. It involves,
however, the complete realisation and satisfaction of the
capacities of the individual, and it involves also the idea
of a common good, in the attainment of which all moral
beings may co-operate. After a full criticism and re-
jection of Hedonism in all its forms, Green proceeds to
show the agreement of his own view of the moral ideal
with that developed in the philosophy of Plato and Aris-
totle, both in their conception of virtuous activity as the
chief good, and in their analysis of the special virtues ;
pointing out, however, that the conception of these virtues
has been enlarged in modern times, under the influence
of Christianity, and especially by the idea of the brother-
hood of men. The Fourth and last Book of the Prolego-
mena discusses the practical value of moral philosophy,
examining in particular the question how his own view
enables us to deal with practical difficulties ; how, in this
point of view, it compares with other theories ; and how,
especially, it enables us to take account not only of the
results, but of the motives of our action.
The difficulty which has been most felt by readers of
the Prolegomena is that raised by the assertion that
vi PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION
man must not be regarded merely as a result of certain
previous conditions, but as a ' reproduction of itself by
an eternal consciousness ' ; in other words, that he is
literally ' made in the image of God.' And perhaps there
are some valid objections to this way of stating the unity
of the universal with the* particular element in man's
being; or, in other words, maintaining that we are obliged
to think of him not merely as an object who is a parti-
cular part of this partial world, but also to regard him as
a being in whom the principle of unity that underlies' all
the differences of the world becomes conscious of itself.
But we have to consider that any valid theory of human
nature must somehow explain the union of these two
aspects of man's being, as, on the one hand, an individual
object in the world, and on the other hand, a subject of
knowledge and a moral being, who is capable of regard-
ing and treating all objects, including himself, in relation
to the whole to which he belongs. Thus, in knowledge
and in fnorality, his point of view is not anthropocentric,
but cosmocentric, or theocentric. For, in so far as he
views the world from the point of view of his own indi-
viduality and acts with sole regard to it, his thought and
his action are illegitimate. Hence those who view
human life in a comprehensive way are apt to describe
it antithetically, alternately emphasizing the different
aspects in which it presents itself. This dualistic way of
describing humanity is especially characteristic of Pascal.
Thus he declares, 'it is dangerous to let man see too
cleai'ly how he is on a level with the animals, without
showing him his greatness. It is dangerous to let him
see too clearly his greatness, without his meanness. If he
boasts himself, I abase him ; if he abases himself, I exalt
him. I contradict him continually, till he comprehends
what an incomprehensible monster he is.'
PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION vii
Green's work may be described as an attempt to
explain this antagonism, and especially to show that the
conception of man, sub specie aeternitatis, may be taken as
the basis of our view of him sub specie lemporis. But it is
by no means easy to find a fit mode of expression for
this unity : a mode of expression that does not fall into
one of the opposite forms of error ; a mysticism which
loses man in God, or an individualism which forgets his
relation both to God and to the world. Green at least
has kept continually both of these aspects in view, and
yet has been able to rise above the via media that re-
mains perpetually ' in doubt whether to call him God or
beast.'
Those who have a living remembrance of Green's
personality will always feel that he has a special right
to be heard on the subject of ethics, seeing that he was
specially characterised by the intimate blending in him
of idealism and practicality. If there was a third quality
by which he was distinguished, it was by an intensely
democratic or Christian tone of feeling that could not
tolerate the thought of privilege, and constantly desired
for every class and individual a full share in all the
great heritage of humanity. Of this sentiment many
illustrations may be found in the following pages. The
practical consequences of Green's ethical principles are
further developed in his Lectures on the Principles of
Political Obligation.
E. CAIRD.
Janitary, 1906.
EDITOR'S PREFACE TO THE FIRST
EDITION
The works by which Professor Green has hitherto been
chiefly known to the general public are his Introdtiction
to Messrs. Longmans' edition of Hume's Philosophical
Works, and his articles in the Contemporary Review on
some doctrines of Mr. Spencer and Mr. Lewes.
When in the year 1877 Mr. Green became Whyte's Pro-
fessor of Moral Philosophy, his main desire was, both in his
teaching and writing, to develope more fully and in a more
constructive way the ideas which underlay his previous
critical writings and appeared in them. The present trea-
tise is the first outcome of that desire ; and doubtless it
would have been only the first but for the premature and
unexpected death of the author in March, 1883.
Even the Prolegomena to Ethics (the title is the author's
own) was left unfinished. The greater part of the book
had been used, some of it twice over, in the Professorial
lectures ; and about a quarter of it (the first 116 pages)
was printed in the numbers of Mind for January, April,
and July, 188a. But, according to a letter of the author
written not long before his death, some twenty or thirty
pages remained to be added, and, though with this ex-
ception the whole was written out nearly ready for print-
ing no part of it can be considered to have undergone
the final revision.
At his death Mr. Green left the charge of the manuscript
to me ; and I have now only to explain the course I have
followed in preparing it for publication.
The manuscript was written in paragraphs, but other-
wise was continuous ; and I may add that it was com-
posed without regard to arrangement in Books and
EDITORS PREFACE ix
Chapters. For that arrangement I am responsible, and
also for the numbering and occasional re-division of the
sections, and for the frequent division of a section into
two or more paragraphs. I have also made the few cor-
rections in expression which seemed to be necessary, and
in one case I have ventured, for the sake of clearness, to
transfer a passage from one place to another. References
have been verified and supplied ; translations of Greek
quetations have been given, where their meaning was not
obvious from the text ; and a few notes have been added
by way of explanation or qualification, for the most part
only where a mark in the author's manuscript showed that
he intended t© reconsider the passage. The Editor's notes,
except where they give merely a reference or translation,
are enclosed in square brackets.
My desire throughout has been to make no changes
except in passages which I felt sure Mr. Green would have
altered had his attention been called to them. With the
further object of rendering the work as intelligible as
possible to the general reader I have ventured to print an
analysis. Mr. Green would probably have followed the
plan he adopted in the Introduction to Hume, and have
placed a short abstract on the margins of the pages. I
have thought it better to print my analysis as a Table of
Contents, as that arrangement clearly separates my work
from the author's, and will also probably be the most useful
to those who care to read an analysis at all. Perhaps I
may further suggest to any reader who is unaccustomed
to metaphysical and psychological discussions that much
of the author's ethical views, though not their scientific
basis, may be gathered from the Third and Fourth Books
alone.
It has been already explained that the book was left
unfinished. But on the whole I thought it best to make
no attempt to add anything, especially as the comparison
X EDITOR'S PREFACE
which occupies the last chapter seems to have reached
a natural conclusion. The reader will also find in the
text indications of subjects which were to have been dis-
cussed. In particular the author — at any rate at one
time — intended to introduce a criticism of Kant's ethical
views (see page 177). But I think this intention must
have been abandoned during the composition of the book,
and, as it is hoped that before long Mr. Green's published
writings will be collected and edited, together with a short
biography and selections from his unpublished manu-
scripts ^, it seemed best that the materials on this subject
furnished by the author's notes for lectures should be
reserved for a future occasion.
I have received material assistance in preparing the
present work for the press. Mrs. Green has compared
the whole of the book in proof with the original manu-
script. Professor Edward Caird, of Glasgow University,
and Mr. R. L. Nettleship, Fellow of Balliol, read through
the proofs and the analysis and sent me many suggestions.
I feel, in particular, that but for Professor Caird's very
full and valuable notes the analysis must have been far
more imperfect than it remains. But it would seem to
me, and to those who have helped me, out of place to
express any gratitude for work given to a book which,
more than any writing of Mr. Green's yet published, may
enable the public outside Oxford to understand not only
the philosophical enthusiasm which his teaching inspired,
but the reverence and love which are felt for him by all
who knew him well.
A. C. BRADLEY.
University College, Liverpool,
Ap-il, 1883.
' See Works of T. H. Green, edited with a Memoir by R. L. Nettleship,
3 vols., Longmans, 1885-8. These volumes contain all Green's wiitings
except the Prolegomena to Ethics.
ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
THE IDEA OF A NATURAL SCIENCE OF MORALS
PAGE
1. The prevalent distrust of Moral Philosophy, and the substitution
of Poetry for the philosophical discussion of moral problems . i
2. Necessity of a scientific answer to these problems. Can this
answer be given by a natural science of man ? . . . 3
3. Such a science, if developed on the lines of the traditional Eng-
lish ethics, would involve a physical theory (a) of conscience,
(b) of free-will. Hume's contribution to (a) . . .5
4. Desiderata left by Hume 6
5. Thetheoryof descentandevolutionassupplyingthesedesiderafa 7
6. (6) Physical theory of what is commonlyunderstood as free-will 8
7. The speculative part of Moral Philosophy being thus reduced
to natural science, the preceptive part must, in consistency,
be abolished, and the unmeaning idea of moral obligation
accounted for 10
8. The idea of such a science suggests the questions : (i) Does not
the knowledge of nature imply a principle in man whicli is not
natural ! And, if so, (2) does not this principle appear also as
consciousness of a moral ideal ? 11
BOOK I. Metaphysics of Knowledge
CHAPTER I
THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN KNOWLEDGE AND IN NATURE
9. Theattemptto answer the first question materialistically involves
a ' hystefon proteron.' All mental functions may be materially
conditioned ; but the material conditions, being constituents of
the world of experience, cannot originate or explain the con-
scious principle which makes that world possible . . .13
10. Why is this conclusion, which seems to be implied even in
commonly accepted doctrines, not more generally acknow-
ledged ? 14
11. Kant's dictum : ' The understanding makes nature.' This may
be taken to mean, first (cf. § 19), that a spiritual principle is
implied in the consciousness of nature or a real world . . 15
The Spiritual Principle in Knowledge
12. This statement is denied, because reality is supposed to be
what is independent of consciousness. But, in fact, the ques-
tion, Is anything real or not ? means, Is it, or is it not, related
as it seems to be related ? , . . . ... .16
xii ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
13. The question implies, that is, the conception of reality ornature
as a single and unalterable order of relations ; and it has no
meaning except to a consciousness possessing this conception 17
14. This conception is necessary : which does not mean that
every one is aware of it, but that experience is only explicable
through its action 18
15. It, or the consciousness of which it is the function, cannot be
the product of experience. It is presupposed in experience,
if that means co«sn'oasHe5s of change ; . . . . .19
16. and if experience means merely a process of change, or a
series of events, it can neither be nor produce the conscious-
ness of that change or those events 20
17. Nor can this consciousness be the effect of any previous
changes or events ; for this supposition is either a repetition
of the last, or has no meaning . . . . . .21
18. Thus the consciousness through which alone nature exists for
us, is neither natural nor a result of nature . . . .22
T/ie Spiritual Principle in Nature
19. Can we say, secondly, that nature /fo«y implies a spiritual prin-
ciple ? 23
20. As before, this idea is resisted by the antithesis between
nature, or the real, and the work of the mind. But this
antithesis is selfrdestructive, if relations are the work of the
mind and yet are the essence of reality . , . -24
21. That it appears to be an absolute antithesis is due to a mis-
interpretation of the true conception of reality, as a single
and unalterable system of relations . . . . -25
22. The real cannot be defined by antithesis to the unreal ; for
that is nothing, and even a false idea is not unreal . . 26
23. But a particular reality, standing in certain relations, may
have relations ascribed to it in which it does, not stand. It
then seems to be what it is not ; . . . . . -27
24. and this is discovered by its showing itself to be alterable.
For what anything is really it is unalterably . . .28
25. This truth may, through confusion, issue in (a) sensational
or (4) materialistic atomism ; the reality (unalterableness) be-
longing to the relation between certain conditions and a cer-
tain sensation being ascribed (a) to the sensation alone, or (b)
to the material conditions and, finally, to atoms alone . . 29
26. If nature, then, means a single and unalterable order of rela-
tions, what is implied in it as the condition of its possibility? 31
27. This question is admissible only if the system of relations is
essentially dependent on something else, which is not related
to the system as its constituents are related to one another . 32
28. This something is that which holds plurality in unity, and so
constitutes relation ;........ 33
29. something therefore the same as, or analogous to, our intel-
ligence 33
ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS xiii
PAGE
30. For (a) even if we admit, with Kant, that there are unknown
things-in-themselves, constituting a reality beyond ' nature '
and producing feelings in us, .,..,. 34
31. still an action of intelligence is necessary, as Kant saw, to
constitute an experience of related objects out of successive
feelings, and so to ' make nature ' : . . . . .35
32. and this intelligence must distinguish itself from the feelings
it unites, and must have a unity correlative to the unity of the
system of relations which is its object , , . , .36
33. Thus the uniform order of nature and our knowledge of that
order have a common source in a spiritual principle ; . .37
34. and, in this sense, the dualism of nature and knowledge must
disappear .......... 38
35. Not that our intelligence is to be regarded as a result of nature
(for this were to treat as a result of nature that which makes
nature possible), ......... 39
36. or nature as a result of our intelligence ; but they are to be
regarded as having a common source and as being com-
municated to us in inseparable correlation , , . .40
37. Such an idealism, which interprets facts as relations and
affirms the reality of nature as opposed to our transitory feel-
ings, is the very reverse of the so-called idealism which
reduces facts to feelings . . . . , . .41
38. But (b) can we on this view admit, with Kant, that there
are things-in-themselves, constitutinga reality beyond 'nature'
or phenomena ; and that, while the ' form ' of phenomena is
due to understanding, the ' matter ' — the affections produced
by things-in-themselves — has a character independent of it ? 4a
39. If so, there will be no universe, but two unrelated worlds,
each determining the same sensation : and this conclusion
would be obvious, if things-in-themselves were not confused
with the material conditions of sensation . , . -44
40. Nor can the difficulty be overcome by making the understand-
ing a product of things-in-themselves ; for this view either
involves the ' hysteron proteron ' of materialism, or, at the
least, qualifies the independence of things-in-themselves by
some relation to the understanding they are supposed to
produce ..... 45
41. Nor does Kant escape this paralogism : for if phenomena, in
respect of their ' matter,' are efifects of things-in-themselves,
the latter are causes and therefore phenomena . . .47
42. Still it may be objected : Though it is impossible to consider
sensation as an effect of things-in-themselves, it is equally
impossible to consider it as a product of understanding ; it
forms therefore an unaccountable residuum, and in this sense
dualism must hold .48
43. Objections like this arise from reflection on the process of
acquiring knowledge, which seems to lead us back to a
material of mere sensation, unqualified by thought . . 49
xiv ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
44. But mere sensation could not be even a beginning of conscious
experience to the individual ....... 5°
45. Nor, even if it could, would this affect the question : for it
cannot be an element either (i) in the world of knowable
facts, or (a) in the consciousness implied in that world . 5°
46. (i) Not in the world of facts ; for a sensation unqualified by
any relation is no fact, and the minimum of such qualification,
that of sequence and degree, implies thought . . • S'^
47. This can be disputed only when thought is wrongly conceived
as a mere faculty of this or that individual . . . .52
48. No doubt sensation may exist without thought in the animals
and in man ; but, as merely felt, it is a fact not for itself but
for consciousness ......... 53
49. (2) Not in the consciousness implied in the world of facts : for,
just so far as we feel without thinking, no world of facts
exists for us .......... 54
50. Alike in the world of fact and in the consciousness implied in
it, feeling and thought are inseparable ; nor can we account
for either as the product of the other, nor for their unity as
the product of anything outside of itself . . . .55
51. Thus the unaccountable residuum, on which the distinction
of nature from things-in-themselves was based, is not to be
found either in the world or in the consciousness to which
the world is object ........ 57
52. Nature, then, implies a non-natural principle, which we may
call a self-distinguishing consciousness, and which cannot be
subject to the relations it establishes between phenomena, —
e.g. cannot be in time or space, cannot be material or moved 58
53. If it be objected that matter is a substance, not a relation, this
only means that it is the correlatum of change ; a determina-
tion which can no more be applied to the spiritual principle
than change itself 59
54. Use and necessity of the distinction between nature and spirit
employed in the above discussion ...... 60
CHAPTER II
THE RELATION OF MAN, AS INTELLIGENCE, TO THE SPIRITUAL
PRINCIPLE IN NATURE
55. Human experience is on the one hand an order of events, on
the other a consciousness of this order. This consciousness
cannot be a part of the process of nature . . , -63
56. This is concealed by the ordinary representation of knowledge
as a series or succession of ' states of consciousness ;' a repre-
sentation which is partially true of the process whereby
knowledge grows and decays, ...... 64
57. but not at all true of knowledge itself, which may be ef
events or phenomena, but cannot be itself a phenomenon or
event ........... 65
ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS xv
PAGE
58. Confusion on this point is due, in part, to the error of
separating intellectual activities, as events in our mental
history, from their objects or contents, and transferring the
latter, from consciousness to ' external things ' . . .66
59. The error is most easily committed in the case of Perception.
Sensation being necessary to perception, the perceived object
is confused with the stimulant of sensation, and thus extruded
from consciousness ........ 67
60. But the stimulant of sensation is never the perceived object;
and this cannot be ' outside ' consciousness . . . .68
61. And it is implicitly admitted that the perceiving consciousness
is no series of phenomena, when a perception is defined as
'the synthesis of all the sensations we have had of the
object' (Lewes) 70
62. For this, if true, must mean, not a number of sensations
revived, as sensations, on occasion of a present sensation
being felt ; but the synthesis of itiejacts that sensations have
occurred with the fact that a sensation now occurs. This
implies a self-distinguishing consciousness, which holds its
experiences together as related facts, and therefore cannot
be a series of events ........ 70
63. And, though the relations through which the perceiving
consciousness determines the object are not adequate to its
full nature, that nature must consist in relations, which again
imply a self-distinguishing consciousness . . . .73
64. This account of perception does not imply that we can make
objects at will — for we cannot make consciousness at will —
but it implies that consciousness, as active even in simple
perception, is not a series of phenomena : . . . - 74
65. and thus shows the existence of an eternal consciousness in
man as tlie basis of an act which all admit that he can perform 75
66. But how can the presence of this eternal principle bereconciled
with the apparent fact that our consciousness varies and grows ? 76
67. Our consciousness, as a function of the animal organism, does
develope in time : but the consciousness which constitutes
our knowledge is the eternally complete consciousness as so
far realised through that organism 77
68. This does not imply two minds in man, but that twoconceptions
are needed for the understanding of the one mind ; as two con-
ceptions are also needed for the understanding of organic life . 78
69. The common notions of the growth of knowledge also involve
this twofold conception of it, as the gradual development in
us of the consciousness of an eternal order; and as this order
cannot exist apart from the consciousness of it, . . . 80
70.. an eternal consciousness must be operative in us to produce
the gradual development of our knowledge . . . .80
71. Illustration of this by the process of reading, where a general
consciousness that sentences have a meaning operates in the
apprehension of the meaning of particular sentences . . 81
xvi ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
72. The self-communication to us of the eternal consciousness can
never be complete, because made in time through the series
of sensuous events; but it is necessary to explain the simplest
beginning, as well as the growth, of knowledge : . . .83
73. not that this fore-casting idea is present to us be/ore the ex-
perience in which it realises itself, but that it operates in that
experience without being reflected on at first , . .83
CHAPTER III
THE FREEDOM OF MAN AS INTELLIGENCE
74. The subject in whom such an eternal consciousness repro-
duces itself is, lilte it, a ' free cause ' . . . . -85
75. It cannot be called the ' cause ' of the world in the sense in
which one phenomenon is called the cause of another ; for
this implies determination from without, whereas conscious-
ness and the world from which it distinguishes itself are not
external to each other, ........ 85
76. nor can either be conceived as having a nature of its own
apart from the other. But we may call it a 'free cause '
because in determining the world it is not determined by
anything other than itself ,.,.... 87
77. Nor does the epithet ' free ' take away all meaning from the
word ' cause ' : for we have in knowledge the experience of
such a causality in ourselves. Though man's natural life is
determined like other phenomena by the eternal conscious-
ness, as a knowing subject he is not determined by it but
a reproduction of it, and therefore a free cause , . .88
78. But does not this imply that man himself is in part a mere
product of nature, and only in part free ? . . . .89
79. No : for (i) even the animal functions organic to knowledge
cease by that fact to be merely natural ..... 89
80. And (2) man himself can mean only the self which dis-
tinguishes itself from natural relations, . . , .91
81. and which, as consciousness of time and of successive events,
cannot itself be conditioned by time or by anything in time , 92
82. That the eternal consciousness realises itself by means of
organic functions which have a natural history, is a fact which
we cannot explain, but it does not affect the freedom implied
in that consciousness . 9a
83. Nor will our conclusion be affected if we suppose that the
human organism hasdescended from a merely animal organism, 94
84. and that the appearance of the distinctively human con-
sciousness may have required as its condition a certain
development of sensibility, which may be itself the result of
a long experience on the part of beings gifted with sense but
not with such consciousness 95
ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS xvii
BOOK II. Th.e Will
CHAPTER I
THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL
85. As consciousness distinguishes itself from impyessions and
thus gradually becomes the apprehension of a world of
knowledge, so it distinguishes itself from wants and impulses
to satisfy them , . . , . , . , • - 97
Sfi. The conception thence arising (even if we confine our view to
objects wanted for the satisfaction of the animal nature) is
that of a world of practice ; of something which should be,
and which, unlike the object of knowledge, depends for its
reality on our prior idea of it . . . . . .98
87. In other words, in the world of practice the determining
causes are motives. And accordingly the question whether
moral philosophy can be a natural science, or whether the
will is free, will be the question whether motives are natural
phenomena . . . . 100
88. A mere want is strictly natural. But a motive involves the
action of self-consciousness on the want : . . . . 100
89. and the necessity of the want to the existence of this motive
does not make the motive natural, unless the self-conscious-
ness implied in it is natural, loi
90. i.e. unless it is an event, or a series of events, or a relation
between events : and it can be none of these . . . 102
91. This does not imply that the motive is in part an animal want
and in part self-consciousness. The motive is always an idea
of personal good ; of which idea animal want may be a con-
dition but cannot be a part 102
92. The existence of action from such motives is far more certain
than that of the actions we call instinctive, and we can only
represent the latter by a negation of the characteristics which
we know to belong to the former 103
93. This knowledge, being a knowledge of action from the inner
side, can only be attaine'd through self-reflection, guarded
by constant reference to the experience of mankind embodied
in language, Kterature, and institutions ; . . . . 104
94. and, as the knowledge so gained is the presupposition of all
enquiry into the history of the fact, it cannot be affected by
such enquiry . ' . . 105
95. Self-reflection then shows that the motive is always an idea
of personal good. The want that conditions it is natural ;
it itself, as constituted by self-consciousness, is not so : and
although its moral quality depends on the concrete character
of the agent, in the formation of that character also self-con-
sciousness has been active . 106
96. When, for example, Esau sells his birthright, an animal want
conditions his motive, but the motive itself is his idea of him-
self as finding his good in the satisfaction of the animal want ;
and if it were not so he would not hold himself responsible . IC7
b
xvlii ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
97. How does this affect the question of moral freedom • The
answer is that the question of freedom is the question as to
the origin of motives ..... ... io8
98. To say that the motive is the outcome of circumstances and
chararacter is ambiguous : for (i) the circumstances determine
the motive only through the reaction of the character or self
on them, and (2) the most important of them presuppose
such reaction in the past ; . ■ 1 • • < • 108
99. and the character or self, being _a reproduction of the eternal
self-consciousness through organic processes, cannot be de-
termined by circumstances which it has not itself determined no
1 00. This does not imply that there is a ' mysterious entity,' called
the self, apart from all particular thoughts, desires, and feelings ;
such a self would be an unreal abstraction, but so also are the
thoughts, feelings, and desires apart from the self , .111
101. Hence also the self in this aspect has a history in the same
sense in which the self as intelligence has ahistory (§ 66 and
foil.) ; the possibility of this history depending on the pre-
sence of a pelf-consciousness which has none , . -IIS
102. Thus the form in which it presents a good to itself is con-
ditioned by past presentations ; but these, like the new pre-
sentation, are time-less acts in which the self identifies itself
with some desire. This identification is the motive, and the
resulting act is therefore free . . . , . .114
103. This point is obscured when the motive is confused with a
mere desire, as it commonly is by indeterminists when they
assert an unmotived choice between motives, and by deter-
minists when they hold that the act is necessarily determined
by the strongest motive , . . , , . .115
304. It is true that the act does necessarily proceed from the
motive ; but the motive is not one of the desires which solicit a
man, but one of these as identified by the man with himself n6
105. To call it 'strongest' is misleading, because this would co-
ordinate it with the mere desires ; and 'strength ' has quite
different meanings as applied to them and as applied to the
will or character . . , , , , , , .117
106. Thus the statement that the motive is the outcome of circum-
stances and character is compatible with the idea of freedom,
if it be understood that both circumstances and character,
though conditioned, are conditioned only through a self-dis-
tinguishing and self-seeking consciousness . • , .118
107. But in admitting this we must guard against the misconception
that the character of a man is something other than himself,
which co-operates with an equally independent force of cir-
cumstances to determine his action , . , . . 120
108. For the character is the man, who is thus not determined
except "as he determines himself ...... 120
109. And, though the act is a necessary result {all results are
necessary results), the agent is not a necessary, because not
, . a natural, agent 121
ANALYTICAL TABLS' OF CONTENTS xix
PAGE
110. Remorse and self-reformation are intelligible on this view ;
which they would not be, either if action, present and past,
did not proceed from self-consciousness, or if it proceeded
from an unmotived power of choice » . ■ . . 122
111. Still an objection may be raised in the form of the question,
' If my present depends on my past, and my future on my
present, why should I try to become better ? ' — a question
arising from the confused idea that, if the act is a necessary
result of the agent, the agent must be necessary, ;. e. an in-
strument of natural forces 124
112. But the question itself implies that the questioner is «o^this,
but a'self-distinguishing and self-seeking consciousness ; that
his future depends upon this consciousness ; and that it would
be absurd ' to try to become better ' unless it so depended . 125
113. If it be rejoined that the agent tvas, to start with, a mere
natural result, and that all his development, even though
self-consciousness is present in it, follows necessarily on
that beginning ; . , 127
1 li, the answer is that from such a beginning no self-conscious-
ness could possibly be developed, for there is no identity
between that beginning and it , .... , 127
CHAPTER II
DESIRE, INTELLECT, AND WILL
115. If a motive is always the idea of some personal good (§91),
how does the good will differ from the bad ? To answer this
question we must consider the nature of will in its relation to
intellect and desire 130
116. Is the unity implied in our speaking of certain phenomena
as desires, as acts of will, and as acts of intellect, in each case
merely the personification of an abstraction ? . . . 130
117. Or is it a real unity, arising from the action of a single prin-
ciple in all the phenomena of each group, — or, rather, one
single principle in all three groups ? , , . . . 132
Desire
118. .Desire, as involving. co«sao«s««ss of self and of an object, is
to be distinguished from instinctive impulse, which implies
only ^e/m^ of self 133
119.. Feeling of self constitutes individuality in a sense in which
individuality does not belong to anything soul-less ; and with
feelinj; of self goes instinctive impulse to pleasure and from pain 134
120. But human individuality is a consciousness of self which
supervenes upon animal self-feeling and transforms it : and
this is the basis of desire as well as of knowledge, both of
them involving consciousness of objects .... 135
121. For example, the instinctive impulse to obtain food, without
consciousiiess of an object, falls short of the desire for food,
involving that consciousness : 13S
b 2
XX ANALYTICA-L TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
122. and so does an impulse arising from the revived image of a
past pleasure ; for such impulse, observable in some animals,
does not require consciousness of self and of an object . . 138
123. This — even if, as setms improbable, any animals share in it
—is that vyhich gives its character to the moral and intellectual
experience of man ......... 138
124. It is implied (i) even in the ' desire for food ' ; clearly so, if
what is desired is really some ulterior object, and not less so,
if what is desired is merely the pleasure of eating . . 139
125. And apart from self-consciousness ' animal ' desire would
have no moral character 140
126. But (2) most of our desires are for objects which are not
directly dependent on animal susceptibility at all, or which,
even where so dependent, are transformed by the addition of
new elements derived from self-consciousness itself . . 141
127. And (3) the same action of self-consciousness is farther im-
plied in the qualification of desires by one another and by the
idea of a happiness on the whole ; ..... 142
128. a qualification present even where effort seems to be con-
centrated on the satisfactipn of a single desire . . . 143
129. Thus there is a real unity in all our desires ; only it is not
Desire, but the self. But this is also the unity in all acts of
intellect ; how then are we to reconcile this with the obvious
difierence of intellect from desire ? 145
Desire and Intellect
130. Neither is reducible to the other, and each is dependent on
the other. For (i) each involves the consciousness of self and
QfawQrldasopposed, andthe effort to overcome this opposition 146
131. Desire, to the consciousness desiring, strives to remove the
opposition by giving reality in the world to an object which,
as desired, is only ideal 147
132. Intellect strives to reduce a material apparently alien and ex-
ternal to intelligibility ; i. e. to make ideal an object which at
first presents itself as only real 149
133. And this unity in desire and intellect may be expressed by
calling the soul, as desiring, practical thought, and the soul,
as understanding, speculative thought 150
134. (2) Further, each is necessarily accompanied by the other :
for intellect would not work unless the end of its working
were desired ; and desire involves intellect, at least in the ap-
prehension of the conditions on which the reality of the
desired object depends 151
136. And in some cases there is a still more complete involution
of desire and intellect ; an intellectual process {e.g. that of
the artist) being throughout a realisation of desire, andadesired
end in practical life involving intellect in its constitution . 152
136. Desire and intellect, then, are difi°erent manifestations of one
self-consciousness, each involved in every complete spiritualact 154
ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS xxi
Desire and Will
PAGE
137. Will seems to be distinct from desire and capable of opposing
it (as well as intellect). In case of such conflict, where is
the unity of self-consciousness ? . . . . . . 155
138. Even if it is true that a man desires, at the same time and in
the same sense, incompatible objects, yet the conflicting
desires, like the desire defeated but still felt, diff'er entirely
from the desire with which the man identifies himself . . 156
139. This latter desire is said (a) to be simply the strongest of
the conflicting desires, or (6) not to be desire at all, but will 157
140. The first view is certainly incorrect : for the relation of the
self to the so-called strongest desire is diflerent in kind from
its relation to the desires as still conflicting .... 158
141. And this is equally the case, whether the adopted desire is
good and the defeated desires bad, or vice versa , . . 159
142. On the other hand, if we accept the second view, we must
understand that will means the adoption of a desired object ;
and also that will acts even where it is not preceded or accom-
panied by any conflicting or defeated desires . . . 160
143. Thus, while the use of language fluctuates, the essential dis-
tinction is that between the >n«>'£ solicitations of desire and the
identification of the self with a desired object (§ 103 foil.) . 161
144. To refuse to call this identification 'desire' would be
arbitrary ; and in this sense of desire will and desire are not
difierent nor in conflict . 163
145. But to call the will ' the strongest desire' is to obliterate the
distinction between the mere solicitations of desire and the
desire which the self has identified with itself . . .163
146. The former act upon the man, but in the latter the man him-
self acts : 164
147. and this equally whether he acts on impulse or after a
conflict of ' desires ' 165
Will and Intellect
148. In spite of the involution of intellect and desire or will (§ 134
foil.), there is a clear distmction between the speculative
and practical employments of the mind ; and therefore, if the
former be called thought and the latter will, these may be
distinguished and even opposed 166
149. But it is misleading to say that mere thought is not will, or
that will is more than thought ; whether by ' thought ' is
meant speculative activity in general (for this is not an
element in will but co-ordinate with it) ; . . . . 168
150. or (2) the otiose contemplation of an action as a possible
future event (for thinking in this sense is not the thinking
involved in willing) ;........ 169
151. or (3) the thought which is involved in willing (for such
thought is, like the desire involved in willing, not a separable
part, but only a distinguishable aspect, of will) . . . 17°
xxii ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
152. The desire and thought which are separable from will and
from each other are antecedent conditions of will, but are not
the desire and thought !« will 171
153. The will then is not some distinct part of a man, separable
from intellect and desire, nor a combination of them. It is
simply the man himself, and only so the source of action . 172
BOOK III. The Moral Ideal and Moral Progress
CHAPTER I
GOOD AND MORAL GOOD
154. The distinction between the good and the bad will is the
basis of Ethics. The form of «//acls of will being the identifi-
cation of the self with the idea of an object in which self-
satisfaction is sought, the moral quality of the act depends
ou the nature of this object . 174
155. Different senses in which these statements could be accepted
by a Utilitarian and by Kant 175
Pleasure and Desire
156. If the difference between objects willed is a difference in
respect of motive, there can be, according to strict Hedonism,
no intrinsic difference between them ; the moral quality of
an act depends on its effects, and while these differ the motive
is always the same, viz. pleasure 177
157. But this theory, which offends the unsophisticated mind,
owes its plausibility to a confusion , . . . .179
158. For, although in all desire self-satisfaction is sought, and
although in all self-satisfaclion there is pleasure, it does not
follow that the object desired is pleasure .... 179
159. Not only is self-satisfaction sought in ways known to involve
a sacrifice of pleasure certain never to be made good ; . . 180
160. but whatever object a man seeks self-satisfaction in, —
whether he be a voluptuary or a saint or an ordinary man, —
it is not the pleasure q/' self-satisfaclion that he seeks . . 181
161. For this presupposes direct desire for the object ; and though
desire for the object may be reinforced by desire for the
pleasure expected in it, yet if the latter desire supersede the
former it tends to defeat itself ...... i8a
162. Owing to the confusion just indicated, Mill is unaware that in
holding some kinds of pleasure to be intrinsically more desir-
able than others he gives up the first principle of Hedonism 183
163. For if pleasure alone is the ultimate good or desirable, on
what ground can some pleasures be described as in their
quality better than others ? 1 84
164. On the ground, according -to Mill, that men knowing both do
prefer the former to the latter. But, if tlie strongest desire
is always for the greatest pleasure, this only shows that the
former are,, for such men, jMawWaftW/y superior . . , 185
ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS xxiii
PAGE
165. Mill's meaning however is not this, but that (for example)
the sense of dignity is much more essential to such men's
happiness than the rejected pleasures 187
166. But the inconsistency of this position with Hedonism is not
perceived, because the desire for the sense of dignity is con-
fused with the desire for the pleasure it may bring . . 188
167. Whereas, in truth, to say that the desired object is essential
to happiness is not to say that the desire for it is a desire for
pleasure 189
168. The same confusion is present in other arguments on which
Mill rests the proof of Utilitarianism 190
169. It is only through it that certain desires, on the reality of
which he insists, can be considered desires for pleasure ; e.g.
the disinterested desire of virtue, and the desires of money,
power, and fame 191
170. It appears therefore that Hedonism involves the denial of an
intrinsic difference between the good and the bad will, and
that the grounds of this denial will not bear examination . 193
The Intrinsic Nature of Moral Good
171. Good, then, being defined as that which satisfies desire, true
good or moral good will be that which satisfies a moral agent,
as such ........... 194
172. What in its fulness this true good is we cannot tell ; but the
idea that it is is the spring of progress towards it, and we can
see in what direction it lies by this progress as so far made . 196
173. The assumptions that it is, that it is present to a divine con-
sciousness, that the idea of it has been the spring of progress
hitherto and is the condition of further moral effort, . . 197
174. rest in part on future discussions, in part on the conclusions
arrived at already, that intellectual and moral activity neces-
sarily imply the reproduction in man of an eternal conscious-
ness which is object to itself ...... 198
175. As being such reproduction under limitations, man is not
merely determined by natural wants, but has the idea of himself
asdifferentlyor more completelyrealisedorsatisfied than he is 199
176. Hence comes the search, and the vanity of the search, for
satisfaction in mere pleasure or other selfish ends ; hence also
the differentia of moral goodness, search for satisfaction in
devotion to an end absolutely desirable ..... 199
177. And this implies the union of developed will with developed
reason; i.e. the seeking for satisfaction in that which con-
tributes to realise a true idea of the end .... 201
178. In this definition a certain precedence is given to reason,
because (though it is also the condition of vice), as rightly
developed, it has the initiative of ail virtue ; . . . . 202
179. the good actually pursued being in most cases discrepant from,
or inadequate to, the idea of true good ; and this idea being
the medium through which the object of actual pursuit is
changed or developed. At the same time this language must
not be taken to' imply an unreal separation of will and reason 203
xxiv ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER II
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MORAL IDEAL
A. The Personal Character of the Moral Ideal page
180. If moral goodness then is devotion to the moral end or ideal,
and if the idea of this end is a divine principle of improve-
ment in man, ......... 206
181. what is its relation to the will and reason of man ? Does it
realise itself in individuals, or in a society to which individuals
are only means, or In ' Humanity ' ? 207
182. Inanycase in/>«>-so«s(personalitymeaningself-consciousness);
for it is only because we cannot reduce this self-objectifying
consciousness to anything else that we believe that a divine
principle realises itself in man ...... 208
183. But the development of our personality depends on society,
and on the other hand is thereby so limited as to seem in-
capable of realising the ideal ...... 209
184. Hence we suppose it to be realised in nations, or in the
progress of Humanity towards a perfect society. But, while
it is true that apart from the nation the individual is an
abstraction, it is also tru^ that a na,tion or national spirit is
an abstraction unless it exists in persons .... 210
185. Progress of Humanity, again, can mean only progress of
personal character to personal character : however we try to
explain the imperfection of this progress on the earth, it
must be personal ......... 212
186. Whatever be the difficulties attending it, the idea of human
progress or development, which, like any idea of development,
does not rest ultimately on observation of facts and cannot be
destroyed by it, involves necessary presuppositions : . . 213
187. (i) that the capacities gradually realised in time are eternally
realised for and in the eternal mind ; 214
188. (2) that the end of the process of development should be a real
fulfilment of the capacities presupposed by the process. And
if it be objected that our knowledge of these capacities is not
such as to give us an idea of the end that would fulfil them, 216
189. we may answer that from our knowledge of them we can say
(i) that their development cannot be a mere process to infinity,
but must have its end in an eternal state of being ; and (2)
that no state of being could be such end, in which the self-
conscious personality presupposed by the process was either
extinguished or treated as a mere means .... 2x6
190. On the other hand, as society implies persons regarding
themselves and others as persons, so also the realisation of
human personality means its realisation in a society, . . 217
191. And although this realisation would seem to imply a diflfer-
ence of functions in the different members of society, it
would imply in all the fulfilment of the idea of humanity,
('. I?, devotion to the perfection of man aig
ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS xxv
B. The Formal Character of the Moral Ideal or Law p.nr
192. Thus the idea which the good will seeks to realise is identical
in form with the idea of the end as realised in the eternal mind.
We have now to see how it becomes the medium through which
the latter idea determines the moral development of man . 220
193. It does so by presenting to us an unconditional good, and
by laying on us an unconditional law of conduct . . . 221
194. When asked what this good is, we can only answer that it is
the good will or the object of the good will ; which again is
the will for the unconditional good (§§ 171, 172). Hedonism
avoids this circle, but only because its ideal is not a moral ideal 223
195. The circle is inevitable; for in the account of an agent whose
development is governed by an ideal of his own perfection
the good will must appear both as end and means . . 224
196. This ideal, in a being who has other impulses than those
which draw to it, must take the form of a law or categorical
imperative : but this again cannot enjoin unconditionally any-
thing but obedience to itself ....... 225
197. It does enjoin, however, at least all the particular duties in
which progress is made towards the realisation of man ; and
it enjoins them unconditionally as against everything except
some new application of itself ...... 226
198. The practical value of the idea of good as a criterion will
be considered later (Book iv) : the present question is the
historical one, how this idea can have defined itself in the
formation of particular duties and virtues .... 227
CHAPTER III
THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE MORAL IDEAL
A. Reason as Source of the Idea of a Common Good
199. The idea of the end or unconditional good is that of the self
as realised. And this self is social; i. e. its good includes that
of others, who are also conceived as ends in themselves . 229
200. This social interest is a primitive fact, and though it may have
been conditioned by, it cannot have been developed from, any
animal sympathy in which it is not presupposed . . . 229
201. It implies the consciousness of self and others as persons,
and therefore the consciousness of a permanent well-being
in which the well-being of others is included . . .231
202. The idea of unconditional good then will express itself in
some form of general social requirement, irrespective of likes
and dislikes ; and this is what underlies the more developed
ideas both of moral and legal right 232
203. In this sense Reason, as necessary to the idea of an absolute
and a common. good, is 'the parent of Law,' in the wider
sense of law ; 233
204. and must have been present in any primitive state from which
our present state has been, in the strict sense, developed ; . 234
xxvi ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
205. for there is no identity between the developed state of man
and any state which has not these characteristics. What
then are the movements into which development from this
germ may be analysed ! ....... 23^
B. The extension of the Area of Common Good
206. In the first place (cf. § 218), this development consists in
the extension of the range of persons whose common good
is sought. The primitive duty to a narrow circle gradually
widens into a duty to man as man ..... 237
207. This duty is felt by the highest minds to be morally as
binding as any legal obligation, and cannot be explained
as a modification of self-interest 238
208. The humanitarian idea is no unreal extension of the social
obligations of man, and must, as it becomes part of recognised
morality, greatly further the development of human capa-
bilities ; and that not only for the many .... 240
209. Hastened in various ways, and especially through its expression
by Stoic philosophers, Roman jurists, and Christian teachers,it
isyet the natural outcomeoftheoriginal idea of a common good : 242
210. and is now fixed to a certain extent in law and in social
requirement ......... 243
211. If we take its abstract expression in the formula 'suumcuique,'
whatdoesthis imply as to the ideals of good and hence of conduc t? 243
212. It Implies a refinement of the sense oi Justice ; i.e. that no
one should seek the good, either of himself or of any one else,
by means which hinder the good of others, or should measure
the good of different persons by diiferent standards . . 244
213. The recognition of this idea by Utilitarianism in the formula,
' Every one to count as one, and no one as more than one,'
has been the main source both cf its beneficence and of its
unpopularity 246
214. The formula is however inferior to Kant's maxim, 'Treat
humanity always as an end ' ; since, strictly interpreted in
accordance wilh Hedonistic principles, it could only com-
mand equality of treatment in case that equality led to greater
total pleasure 247
21-5. This idea of justice, and of a duty to man as man, is at once
a priori^ as an intuition of conscience, and a posteriori^ as
a result of social progress embodied in institutions . . 249
216. For the extension of the range of duty to the whole of
humanity is the work of the same reason which is implied
in the most elementary idea of common good, aud the
immanent action of which has overcome and utilised the
opposition raised to it by selfishness ;.,... 250
217. Reason being the beginning and end of the process, and its
action without the individual and within him being only
different aspects of the operation of one and the same principle 253
ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS xxvii
CHAPTER IV
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MORAL IDEAL — CONTINUED
C. The Determination of the Idea of Common Good
PAGE
218. In the second place, moral progress is not only the widening
of the range of persons whose common good is sought, but
the gradual determination of the content of the idea of good 254
Pleasure and Common Good
219. Owing to the presence of reason in man, the self is dis-
tinguished from particular desires, and their satisfaction is
accompanied or followed by the idea of something that would
give full and lasting satisfaction 255
220. And this idea of a good on the whole, by relation to which
the value of a particular satisfaction is estimated, is involved
in all moral judgment 256
221. It is supposed, on the ground that all desire is for pleasure,
to be the idea of a greatest sum of pleasures. But if all
desire is for pleasure, it rather follows that a sum of plea-
sures cannot be desired, since it is not a pleasure and can only
be conceived, not felt or imagined :..... 257
222. so that, if a sum of pleasures is, as a matter of fact, desired,
this fact only shows that there is in man a desire wholly
difiFerent from the desire for pleasure, vis. a desire for the
satisfaction of a permanent self 259
223. But can the good which satisfies the self be a sum of pleasures ?
No ; for tlie good is conceived as at least relatively permanent 260
224. If, nevertheless, many persons aCSrm that their idea of this
good is the idea of a sum of pleasures, the reason is that the
desire for objects which will yield satisfaction is misinter-
preted as desire for pleasure, whence the conclusion is drawn
that good on the whole must be a number of pleasures . 261
225. And even when the misinterpretation is rejected and a dis-
interested desire for the good of others is asserted, this is
supposed to be a desire for their pleasure .... 263
226. Such a view however requires us to suppose two co-ordinate
principles of moral action and judgment, viz. Reasonable
Self-l,ove ^nd Benevolence ; and this result can be avoided
only by reducing Benevolence to Self-Love, or by showing
that the object of Self-Love is not a sum of pleasures . . 263
227. That the second alternative is the truth is seen when we
consider that a sum of pleasures cannot be enjoyed, and that
each successive enjoyment of pleasure brings us no nearer to
the good pursued ......... 264
228. And, though it is true that a man might think of his good or
happiness (not indeed as a sum of pleasures, but) as a con-
tinuous enjoyable existence, still what men really do pursue
is not this, but a well-being consisting in the attainment of
desired objects ......... 266
xxviii ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
229. Such an ideal and permanent object, and probably the most
generally prevalent one, is the welfare of a family : and the
desire for this is absolutely different from a desire for pleasure. 268
230. Whether or no the true good was at first identified with
family well-being, it must have had the two characteristics of
inspiring an interest and of being permanent like the self it
has to satisfy 269
231. And the well-being of a family, which is identified by a man
with his own well-being and outlasts his life, has these charac-
teristics . . . , 270
232. Thus the true good is, and in its earliest form was, a social
good, in the idea of which a man does not distinguish his own
good from that of others . . . . . . .271
233. Even if it were conceived as a succession of pleasures, desire
for it would still not be reducible to desire for an imagined
pleasure (§ 222) ; and, on the other hand, the Self-Love and
Benevolence which would, on this supposition, each be
directed to pleasures, would remain co-ordinate, not identical. 273
234. But in reality the good which a man seeks for himself is not
a succession of pleasures, but objects which, when realised,
are permanent contributions to a social good which tfius
satisfies the permanent self ,....., 274
235. And this obviously involves the permanent good of others; so
that, though a man may also seek his own pleasure, or, again,
their pleasure, his idea of the true good is not an idea of
pleasure, and in it there is no distinction of self and others . 275
236. The happiness he seeks for them is the same as that he seeks
for himself, viz. the satisfaction of an interest in objects . 277
237. If he nevertheless supposed that he soOght pleasures for
others, this mistake, though probably of no great practical
moment, would still be a mistake 278
238. And this would be seen if the questions were considered, (i)
whether he values the pleasures he supposes himself to seek
for others by their quantity alone, and (2) whether what he
seeks for others is not some permanent good such as is not
to be found in experiences of pleasure 279
239. This permanent good may be conceived in very different
forms according to circumstances, but in any of its forms it
consists not in pleasures, but in a realisation of a good common
to self and others 280
Virtue as the Common Good
240. There is a common basis in the lowest form of interest in the
continued ' being ' of the family, and in the highest form of
interest in social ' well-being ' ; and the latter developes out
of the former 281
241. For the former already involves the idea of a good which
consists in the development of the capacities of persons ; and
this idea, acting unconsciously, gradually creates institutions
and modes of life, reflection upon which shows what these
capacities really are 283
ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS xxix
PAGE
242. In the early stages of this progress the social good may appear
to be conceived merely as material well-being ; but reflection
would show that this was not its whole content, and that the
interest in it was really an interest in persons capable of a like
interest, i. e. an interest in virtue ...... 284
243. At some time such reflection has arisen, and with it a con-
scious interest in virtue ; as is shown by the distinction made in
the earliest literature between the possession of external goods
and merit, or goods of the soul ...... 286
244. The progress from this beginning to the conviction that the
only true good is to be good is complementary to the process
described above (§§ 206-217) j ^o"" "is only good that is really
common is the good wUl ....... 287
245. And if the idea of the community of good for all men has even
now little influence, the reason is that we identify the good too
little with good character and too much with good things . 288
CHAPTER V
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MORAL IDEAL— CONTINUED
JP. The Greek and the Modern Conceptions of Virtue
246. Thus progress with regard to the standard and practice of
virtue means the gradual recognition that the true end consists
not in external goods, nor even in the virtues as means to
these, but in the virtues as ends in themselves : . . . 290
247. the recognition, that is, that the true end is the good will,
which is to be conceived not merely as determined by the idea
of moral law, but as active in the various endeavours to
promote human development ...... 291
248. Out of the earUest conception of virtue as valour in the struggle
for common good grows the more complete Greek idea of it as
including any eminent faculty, but the estimation of it has
always been governed by an interest in man himself, not in
what happens to him ........ 293
249. At a certain stage of reflection arises an effort to discover a
unity in the virtues and the various aspects of the good ; and
this effort, as is clear in the case of Socrates and his successors
(to whom we owe our chief moral categories), has a great
practical importance ........ 294
250. By such reflection the reason which had been active in social
development became aware of its achievement, and so pro-
duced not merely an ethical theory but a higher order of virtue 296
251. For the idea of virtue as one and conscious is equivalent to
the idea of the good will or of purity of heart ; . . .297
252. and this is what Plato and Aristotle require, when they insist
that the condition and unity ofall viHue lie in the conscious
direction of the will to the human good .... 297
253. That good was to them not pleasure but the exercise of the
virtues themselves. In this respect their definition of the good
is final ; artd if they could only imperfectly define the content
of the idea, that defect is due mainly to the nature of morality
itself 299
XXX ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS
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254. The good was defined, to the extent then possible, by the
actual pursuit of it in the recognised virtues : , . . 3°'
255. and the philosophers still further defined it, and also raised
and purified the idea of it, by making men realise that these
virtues wrere different expressions of one principle . • 3°^
256. Thus we inherit from the Greek philosophers both the
principle of morality and the general articulation of that
principle 3°3
257. Only our idea of the end has become fuller, because the end is
more fully realised ; and accordingly the standards of virtue,
though identical in principle, are more comprehensive in their
demands. This will appear if we examine the ideas of
Fortitude and Temperance ....... 303
258. Fortitude seems at first sight to have changed its character
since Aristotle's time. For, with the recognition of human
capacities in all and not merely in a few, .... 304
259. Fortitude has come to involve, not merely the self-devotion of
the citizen-soldier to his state, but self-devotion to the service
of others, even of those whom the Greeks would have re-
garded as ignoble and useless 306
260. But the principle of unlimited endurance for the highest social
cause known remains the same, and the motive is neither more
nor less pure ......... 307
261. Temperance and Self-denial were limited by Aristotle to the
pleasures of animal appetite 308
262. But the principle on which these pleasures were to be con-
trolled or renounced was the same as in our wider virtue of
self-denial; even when most ascetically conceived . . 309
263. The motive of temperance was interest in something wider
and higher than these pleasures, this higher object being to
the Greek his state 310
264. To us also the higher object is the state or some other asso-
ciation ; but the requirements of this virtue, as of fortitude,
have become much more various and comprehensive . .311
265. Accordingly, if we dismiss, as mistaken, the idea that the
pleasures in question ought to be rejected because they are
not distinctively human, ...,,., 313
266. we find (i) that the really tenable principles used by Aristotle
did not yield a standard adequate to the modern ideal of sexual
morality. But the fault lay not in these principles, which are
the only true ones, but in the social conditions of the time ; . 315
267. just as a further improvement now must depend mainly on a
further improvement in social conditions, and especially in the
position of women 316
268. Further, (2) the range of the actions which issue from tem-
perance, as conceived by Aristotle, is far more limited than
that of the actions in which self-denial, as now conceived,
is shown , . . . 317
269. For in the highest formsof self-denial the pleasures renounced
are not those of animal appetite, but the higher pleasures ; , 318
ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS xxxi
PAGE
270. the call for such sacrifice arising from that enfranchisement of
all men which implies a claim of all upon each, necessarily
unrecognised by Aristotle 320
271. Thus, here again, progress is due to the greater comprehen-
siveness of the idea of social good ; and, while the good will
is the same in the Greek and the modern ideals, it demands
now a new and larger self-denial . . . . . .321
272. It may be objected that this change is not a progress but a
retrogression, because it involves a larger renunciation of
pleasures not mischievous but valuable ..... 322
273. But this renunciation, though not in itself desirable, does,
when considered in its reality and in relation to society as a
whole, imply a fuller realisation of human nature . . 323
274. For the realisation described in the Greek ideal, and appar-
ently so much fuller than any attainable by the self-denying
Christian, was possible only to a few, and to them only
through the exclusion of others :..,,.. 324
275. wher.eas Ijie end sought by the modem ideal character is
sought for all, and the activities called out by the pursuit of
it are correspondingly wider ; and of this advance the larger
renunciation of pleasures seems to be a condition . . 325
276. Further, while the more developed state of man certainly
implies a corresponding pleasure, it is doubtful whether it
implies a greater amqunt of pleasure than the less developed,
and whether even the perfection of man may not involve
a large renunciation of possible pleasure .... 326
277. In any case it can hardly be held that the self-denying man
obtains, because he follows his strongest desires, more plea-
sure than he forgoes ; nor is it at all clear even that his
self-denial increases the aggregate of human pleasures . 327
278. So that the superiority must be claimed for the modern ideal,
not on Hedonistic grounds, but on those given in §§ 273-275 329
279. To sum up : the Platonic or Aristotelian conception of virtue
is final in so far as it defines the good as goodness ; but as
a concrete ideal it was conditioned by the moral progress then
achieved, and is therefore necessarily inadequate ; , . 329
280. since the idea of human brotherhood leads to social require-
ments then unrecognised 331
281. On the other hand, the social development to which this
idea is due was in part the result of the Greek conception
of the good as something in essence universal : for no good
except goodness is really this 332
282. It is an illusion to suppose that the desires of difierent men
for pleasure would, if left to themselves, produce the greatest
possible general pleasure or a social union .... 333
283. On the contrary, interest in the common good, in some of
its various forms, is necessary to produce that good, and to
ijeutrglise or render useful other desires and interests . , 335
xxxii ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
284. Now the good, as defined by the Greek philosophers, was in
principle a universal good (though they did not so imagine
it), and thus their work prepared the way for the idea of
human brotherhood 336
285. For it provided the intellectual medium through which men,
influenced by Christian enthusiasm and by the results of
Roman conquest, could definitely conceive goodness as
realised in the members of a universal society . . . 337
286. Ideal virtue, then, being defined as self-devoted activity to
the perfection of man, this perfection itself may be defined
as a life of such activity on the part of all persons . . 339
287. Nor is the objection valid that self-devotion, as implying an
impeded activity, cannot be an element in ultimate good, but
must belong only to the effort to attain that good . . 340
288. For though the perfection of man would mean such a realis-
ation of human possibilities as we cannot imagine, it must
still find its principle in the same devoted will which is
manifested in all effort to attain it ..... 341
289. It may however be objected, (i) that our definition of virtue
does not cover artistic and scientific excellence, and there-
fore leaves their value unexplained ; 343
290. (2) that it does not help us to decide what ought to be done,
and whether we are doing it. With this second objection
we have now to deal ........ 343
BOOK IV. The Application of Moral Philosophy to the
Guidance of Conduct
CHAPTER I
THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF THE MORAL IDEAL
291. The question, Ought an action to be done? may refer (i) to
its effects, (a) to its motive. The latter question is the wider,
as it includes the former ....... 346
292. The answers to either question must be regulated by one and
the same principle. According to Utilitarianism, relation to
pleasure must be the standard for both effects and motive ; but
the goodness of the act depends on the effects alone . . 347
293. According to our theory, the act cannot be in the full sense
good, unless the motive is good : but we may estimate it apart
from the motive, and we must do so when (as is commonly the
case with the acts erf others) the motive is unknown to us . 348
294. Thus this theory differs from Utilitarianism in holding
(i) that the effect to be considered is contribution not to
pleasure but to the perfection of man, (a) that this effect by
itself cannot make the act in the full sense good . . . 350
295. Indeed, but for our imperfect knowledge, we should see
that in all cases the character of the effects really represents
accurately that of the motive ...... 3=3
ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS xxxiii
PAGE
296. But since for practical purposes enquiry into motive is re-
stricted to acts of our own, whether past- or future, the ques-
tion is, Can such enquiry give a truer knowledge of what we
ought to do, or a better disposition to do it ? . . . . 354
^_297. The habit of such enquiry is cgnscientiousness : and, admitting
that self-devotion need not imply this habit, and that, in a
sense, a man may be ' over-conscientious,' . . . . 355
298. it remains true that the comparison of our actions with an
ideal of goodness is the spring of moral progress, social as
well as individual 356
299. For there is a real identity between such self-scrutiny as to
motives, and the reformer's comparison of what is actual
with a social ideal ; the social ideal of the reformer being at
the same time the idea of himself as promoting it . . . 357
300. But, it may be said, the effect in this case is a new kind of
action, whereas the acts of the conscientious man probably
do not differ outwardly from those of the ordinary dutiful
citizen . 359
301. The latter statement is however not entirely true : for con- <Xj^
ventional morality, being the result of the past working of an *^^,
ideal consciousness, will not yield its highest meaning except ;. ,^»,
to a spirit like that which produced it 359
302. And, apart from this, such a spirit has an intrinsic value, which
(unlike zeal for social reform) would remain even if the human
end were as fully realised as is possible to finite beings , 360
303. And under present conditions the difference between the ),
social reformer and the ' saint ' is one, not of will or prin- '
ciple, but of circumstances and gifts 362
304. But, if conscientiousness has thus anjntnnsic value, can
we furthersaythat this enquiry into one's own motives may
(§ 296) give a truer knowledge of what we ought to do and
a better disposition to do it ? 364
305. It is clear that mere honesty in such enquiry will not ensure
a correct judgment as to effects, and that, if the effects are p
bad, the state of mind, or motive, from which the act pro.- ■
ceeded cannot have been ideally good ..... 364
306. Butthe function of consr^gnce is not to estimate the precise
value of an act (which is, strictly speaking, impossible to us),
but to maintajn_moraT aspiration ; and this it can do without
exhaustive enquiry into the consequences of conduct . . 366
307. And thus conscientiousness, though it does not itself instruct
us what to do, suggests the search for new instruction and
enjoins the acting upon it when found ...... 367
308. For the ideal, in the conscientious mind, is not a mere de- y/
finition, but an active idea, constantly applying itself to fresh,
circumstances 369
309. And thus it is the creator of existing moral practice, and, in
its various forms, the condition of all further progress . 370
c
xxxiv ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER II
THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF A THEORY OF THE MORAL IDEAL p^^^
310. As the presence of the moral ideal in the character cannot
always avert perplexity, we may ask, Can philosophy, ;. e. a
theory of the moral ideal, render any service in such cases ? . -372
311. It can render a service, though mainly of a negative kind ;
either by delivering us from the perplexity which arises from
the conflict of rules or institutions believed to have an absolute
authority, or by counteracting inadequate moral theories which
may give an excuse for a rebellion of the lower nature . 373
312. For the dangers arising from inadequate theories, and from
the necessarily partial character of the theory of any particular
time, can be met only by the further pursuit of philosophy
itself ....,.,,... 375
313. It is not indeed the function of philosophy to give directions
(i) as to the ordinary duties which form the great mass of
morality ; 375
314. or to remove perplexity (a) regarding the exact circumstances
or effects of action, or (3) due in reality to a concealed egoistic
motive ........... 377
315. But where, as in the case of Jeannie Deans, the perplexity is due
to a conflict between conscience and a really noble impulse, we
may ask whether our theory of the good could give any help 378
316. It could not if the conflicting claims were described in the
abstract : but in a particular case the philosopher might
press the question, whether the good impulse did not imply
a shrinking from a higher but more painful good . . . 379
317. Really however in such a case the philosopher's judgment
would, like other men's, consist in a more intuitive application
of the ideal ; and philosophy can only be of use in preparing
for such junctures by sustaining the ideal through an explan-
ation of the imaginative forms in which practical ideas express
themselves,. and which alone affect usdecisively in an emergency 38 1
318. For such forms must be theoretically inadequate to spiritual
realities, and are therefore easily supposed to represent no
spiritual reality , , 38a
319. And against this mere scepticism, where it attacks those
creations of the religious imagination which are ethically
adequate, philosophy has a theoretical work to do, which
yields a practical result, ....,., 383
320. by preventing the doubt which may arise in a moment of
emergency, whether the demand of conscience, coming in an
imaginative form, is not illusory 384
321. There remain the cases of true perplexity of conscience, in
which equal authorities seem to conflict, and conscience seems
to be divided against itself . . , . ; , . 385
322. For these philosophy may prepare the mind by showing how
the opposed dicta of conscience, though both products of the
idea of unconditional good, are not of necessity uncondition-
ally valid , 387
ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
323. The content of the obh'gation they assert is blended with
the imagination of some authority imposing it : whereas, in
fact, no really external authority can impose a duty , . 388
324. Thus, though there cannot really be more than one duty in
a given set of circumstances, there may be conflicting demands
of diiTerent authorities, both regarded as absolute . . 390
325. In such cases it is certainly not for philosophy simply to
destroy men's reverence for these authorities by pointing out
that they are external ; ....... 391
326. but rather to show that their commands are at once inter-
preted and limited by the idea of absolute good of which they
are partial expressions ........ 393
327. This practical service will best be rendered, if philosophy
restricts itself to its theoretical and proper function of under-
standing the end or ideal, and its relation to external autho-
rities and to conscience ....... 393
328. Such enlightenment however, to be of practical value, presup-
poses a well-formed habitual morality ..... 395
CHAPTER III
THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF A HEDONISTIC MORAL PHILOSOPHY
329. The moral theory which has been of most public service in
modern Europe is Utilitarianism ...... 397
330. Objections to its appeal to expediency are, in the main, ill-
founded ; and though such an appeal may cover an egoistic
motive or be superficial, this is also true of appeals to principle 398
331. The healthful influence of Utilitarianism has arisen from its
giving a wider and more impartial range to the desire to do
good, not from its stimulating that desire, .... 399
332. nor, again, from its definition of good as pleasure : for in the
public causes where it has furthered progress, the important
question has been, not as to the nature of ultimate good, but
as to the number of persons whose good is to be sought . 400
333. At the same time the question may be raised, whether this
definition of good, if logically carried out, would not destroy
the practical value of Utilitarianism and do harm , . . 402
334. Probably most Utilitarians, even if strict Hedonists, would not
hold that private conduct either is or should be usually directed
by a calculation of consequences in the way of pleasure . 403
335. On the other hand, such calculation has been becoming much
more common, and is undertaken with a direct view to the
guidance of life 404
336. Rejecting the idea that Hedonism in this way directly pro-
motes immorality, our question will be whether it may not
put speculative impediments in the way of moral progress . 406
337. Its prevalence may be ascribed (apart from theoretical mis-
takes) to the necessary indefiniteness of the account of the
good as human perfection, and the apparent clearness of its
definition 'as pleasure 407
C 2
x,xxvi ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
338. But in reality, while either theory may suffice for the ordinary
cases where no theory is needed, in the few remaining cases
.Hedonism is intrinsically unavailable . , . ; • 4°^
339. If, for example, a man thinks of acting against inclination or
social expectation for the sake of increasing the total of
■pleasure, how can he assure himself of this result ? . .410
340. Any one who puts such a question must face a preliminary
difficulty. For, if action must follow the strongest desire, and
this is necessarily of what seems the greatest pleasure, it
follows that the aggregate of pleasures at any time enjoyed
tnusi be the greatest that could be obtained for that given
time through action 4^1
341. Bui, if so, we cannot say that a man ought to have acted as he
did not. And even where we seem able to say that a different
course, if it had been possible, would have produced more
■pleasure to him, . . . • . . . . . . 412
342. such ajudgment cannot be generalised ; and any prediction of
the kind will be subject to an indefinite number of exceptions
due to the character or circumstances of individuals . . 414
343. Again, if it be maintained that a course of action, ii generally
pursued, would tend to diminish pleasure, this has no bearing
on the question whether, as pursued here and now, it will
diminish the pleasure of the agent : . .' . . . 415
844. and if he is told to consider the total of human pleasure, it
seems impossible to decide, in the case supposed, whether
this will be augmented or diminished by the act . . . 416
345. Nor can the reformer even hope that by his labours and
sacrifices the sum of pleasure necessarily obtained in the
future will be greater than that necessarily obtained now : for,
though he may hope that such increase may happen, he cannot
logically suppose that he has any initiative in the matter . 417
346. And this speculative conclusion, even if merely suspected,
must tend to weaken the good will, or devotion to duty . 419
347. For how can the phraseology of duty be explained, when
nothing can be done except from desire for pleasure or aver-
sion to pain ? 420
348. A duty must be explained to mean, ultimately, an act pleasing
to others, whose pleasure may produce results pleasant to
the agent ; and conscience must be explained as the result of
association and heredity . . . . . . .421
349. By this theory we may avoid some of the perplexities dis-
cussed above ;,.....,., 423
350. but (as an illustration will show) the difficulty of explaining
the moral initiative of the individual, and the danger of
weakening it, are still involved 424
351. And this danger might become real, if the Hedonistic criterion
came to be widely used by men who did not, like the leaders
of Utilitarianism, give a higher interpretation of their theory
in reference to great,schejnes of social reform . , . 428
AtiAUyriCAL TABLE OF CONTENTS xxxvii
CHAPTER IV
THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF UTILITARIANISM COMPARED WITH THAT
OF THE THEORY OF THE GOOD AS HUMAN PERFECTION PAGE
352. The theory of the good as human perfection accounts for
the moral initiative, but can it give any guidance as to the
direction that initiative ought to take ? Can it, that is, beside
stimulating conscientiousness, help to decide whether a new
course of action (§ 339) will further the human end? . . 430
.353. Though we cannot form a positive or detailed conception of
what- human perfection would- be, there is no difficulty, at
this stage of human progress, in conceiving an idea of a state
nearer to perfection than the existing state .... 432
354. Hence though the idea of human perfection cannot enable us
to calculate the effects of any institution or action, it supplies
a measure of value for these effects in their relation to the
production of personal excellence ..... 434
355. To this it may be objected that in almost all cases a Utilitarian
could accept this criterion (though not as ultimate), and that
in the few remaining cases it is of no avail .... 436
356. The first part of the objection may be, on the whole, admitted,
if the Utilitarian theory is separated from the Hedonistic theory
of motives, and maintains only that the ultimate good and
criterion is the greatestsum of pleasure to all human or sentient
beings. What then can be said in favour of such a theory ? . 437
The Good as Greatest Pleasure
357. If the idea that the only possible motive is pleasure is aban-
doned, and it is held that in the actions most esteemed the
motive is not pleasure, why is the ultimate good and criterion
held to be pleasure ? 439
358. Probably mainly because this criterion is supposed to be
definite and intelligible, since every one knows what pleasure
is, and in a certain sense can compare a larger sum of pleasure
with a smaller, and a larger sum of human or sentient beings
with a smaller ,,...,... 440
359. But the Chief Good, according to the theory, is the greatest
possible sura of pleasures. This strictly taken is a phrase with-
out meaning, and cannot be used as a criterion for approval
and disapproval of motives and actions . . . .441
360. Are we £0 suppose" then that the Chief Good contemplated
by the theory is a state of general enjoyable existence ? . 442
361. Such a conception, though not untrue, would be less definite
than burs, 'which does not define the Chief Good by the single
and undistinctive quality of pleasantness .... 443
362. Further, while such practical guidance as this criterion seems
to afford depends on the assumption that conventional morality
is to be followed, that morality owes its existence to efforts
not conventional ; and how could the criterion have directed
men to these ? 444
xsxviii ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
363. On the other hand, the conception of the good as human per-
fection does help us to interpret this conventional morality,
and thus to see the direction in which we should sometimes
go beyond it 445
Mr. SidgwicKs view of Ultimate Good
36i. According to our theory the human perfection identified with
ultimate good is a ' state of desirable consciousness,' though
not simply a state of pleasure ; and pleasure is anticipated
in the attainment of the desired end, though it is not the end
desired 447
365. According to Mr. Sidgwick's theory, on the other hand, de-
sirable consciousness is the same as pleasure, and his Univer-
salistic Hedonism (differing from the older Utilitarianism)
seems to rest on the position that reason pronounces ultimate
good to be desirable consciousness or pleasure, and, further,
universal pleasure ......... 449
366. But 'desirable,' when it is distinguished from 'desired,'
seems to be equivalent to 'reasonably to be desired ;' and, if
so, the doctrine will be that reason pronounces ultimate good
to be the kind of consciousness it is reasonable to seek ■ 450
367. And this circular statement is true, in so far as it expresses
the fact that, as reason gives the idea of the end, that end
must at any rate be something that will satisfy reason . . 45a
368. The tautology is avoided where the end is defined as ' plea-
sure of all sentient beings ; ' but then what ground is there
for thinking that this end would satisfy reason ? . . . 453
369. Pleasure is defined as ' desirable consciousness : ' but the
end which a rational being seeksyby himself, if desirable (not
desired) consciousness, cannot be pleasure .... 454
370. And, as we have seen, the rational soul, in seeking an end,
must seek it as its own realisation, and this involves that it
must seek also a like realisation of others .... 455
871. The perfection of man then, or ultimate good, will be a de-
sirable conscious life, pleasant but not pursued as pleasure . 457
372. We return to the comparison of the theories as possible
sources of guidance in the exceptional cases where philo-
sophy may be appealed to ...... . 458
373. In these cases it appears that Universalistic Hedonism would
give no answer, and would thus leave to inclination the
question of a painful departure from custom . . . . 459
374. For,, ex fi^pothesi, the Hedonistic criterion supposed to be
represented by conventional morality fails us ; and how can
the effects of the action on universal pleasure be theoretically
estimated? 460
375. In reality recourse is always had to some such ideal as that
of human perfection. Can this then yield any guidance ? . 461
ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS xxxix
PAGE
876. It can at least say that the loss of pleasure involved in the
painful departure from custom is morally indifferent, whereas
the will so exerted is not only a means to further good but
itself a realisation of good ; 462
377. and that the further good which calls for the sacrifice is a
bettering of man, identical in principle with that which is
involved in the sacrifice . 463
378. With Universalistic Hedonism the presumption must be
against the sacrifice : for it would ajways involve the loss of
a certain pleasure in the present for the sake of an uncertain
gain of pleasure in the future ...... 465
379. On the other theory the presumption is in favour of the
sacrifice ; and for the particular case the criterion, though not
by itself decisive, is more definite and easier to apply . . 466
380. For it is harder to say whether a particular course of action
will increase universal pleasure — all other effects being de-
sirable only as a means to this — than to say whether it will
promote human excellence ; . . . . . . ■ 4^7
381. this being conceived as a common good, and the mode in
which the individual can most fully contribute to it depend-
ing on circumstances and on his special aptitude . . . 469
882. Our conclusion then is that, in the few cases where there is
need or time to apply to philosophy for guidance, the theory
of goodness as an end in itself is more available and less
dangerous than Universalistic Hedonism .... 470
PROLEGOMENA TO ETHICS
INTRODUCTION
1. A WRITER who seeks to gain general confidence scarcely
goes the right way to work when he begins with asking
whether there really is such a subject as that of which he
proposes to treat ; whether it is one to which enquiry can
be directed with any prospect of a valuable result. Yet to a
writer on Moral Philosophy such a mode of procedure is
prescribed, not only by the logical impulse to begin at the
beginning, but by observation of the prevalent opinions
around him. He can scarcely but be aware that Moral
Philosophy is a name of somewhat equivocal repute ; that
it commands less respect among us than was probably the
case a century ago; and that any one who professes to teach
or write upon a subject to which this name is in any proper
or distinctive sense applicable, is looked upon with some
suspicion.
There is, indeed, no lack of utterance in regard to the
great problems of life or the rights and wrongs of human
conduct. Nor does it by any means confine itself to what
are commonly counted secular or ' positive ' censideratians.
Guesses as to some
sweet strange mystery,
Of what beyond these things may He,
And yet remain unseen,
are announced with little reserve and meet with ready
acceptance. These, we may say, are for the multitude of
the educated, who have wearied of the formulas of a stereo-
typed theology, but still demand free indulgence for the
appetite which that theology supplied with a regulation-diet.
But the highest poetry of our time— that in which the most
serious and select spirits find their food — depends chiefly for
2 PROLEGOMENA TO ETHICS
its interest on what has been well called ' the application of
ideas to life;' and the ideas so applied are by no means
sensibly verifiable. They belong as little to the domain of
natural science, strictly so called, as to that of dogmatic
theology. A moral philosopher may be excused for finding
much excellent philosophy, in his special sense of the word,
in such poems as the 'In Memoriam' of Lord Tennyson and
Mr. Browning's 'Rabbi ben Ezra,' to say nothing of the more
explicitly ethical poetry of Wordsworth. Presented in the
rapt unreasoned form of poetic utterance, not professing to do
more than represent a mood of the individual poet, it is wel-
comed by reflecting men as expressing deep convictions of
their own. Such men seem little disturbed by the admission
to a joint lodgement in their minds of inferences from popu-
larised science, which do not admit of being reconciled with
these deeper convictions in any logical system of beliefs.
But if any one, alarmed at this dangerous juxtaposition,
and unwilling that what seem to him the deepest and truest
views of life should be retamed merely on scientific suffer-
ance, seeks to find for them some independent justification,
in the shape of a philosophy which does not profess to be
a branch either of dogmatic theology or of natural science,
he must look for little thanks for his trouble. The most
intelligent critics had rather, it would seem, that the ideas
which poetry applies to life, together with those which form
the basis of practical religion, should be left to take their
chance alongside of seemingly incompatible scientific beliefs,
than that anything calling itself philosophy should seek to
systematise them and to ascertain the regions to which they
on the one side, and the truths of science on the other, are
respectively applicable. ' Poetry we feel, science we under-
stand ; ' — such will be the reflection, spoken or unspoken, of
most cultivated men; — 'theology professes to found itself
on divine revelation, and has at all events a sphere of its
own in the interpretation of sacred writings which entitles
it at least to respectful recognition; but this philosophy,
which is neither poetry nor science nor theology, what is it
INTRODUCTION 3
but a confusion of all of these in which each of them is
spoilt ? Poetry has a truth of its own, and so has religion —
a truth which we feel, though from the scientific point of
view we may admit it to be an illusion. Philosophy is from
the scientific point of view equally an illusion, and has no
truth that we can feel. Better trust poetry and religion to
the hold which, however illusive, they will always have on the
human heart, than seek to explain and vindicate them, as
against science, by help of a philosophy which is itself not
only an illusion but a dull and pretentious one, with no
interest for the imagination and no power over the heart.'
2. With such opinion in the air all around him, it must
be with much misgiving that one who has no prophetic
utterance to offer in regard to conduct, but who still believes
in the necessity of a philosophy of morals which no adapta-
tion of natural science can supply, undertakes to make good
his position. He will gain nothing, however, by trying to
sail under false colours, or by disguising his recognition of
an antithesis between the natural and the moral, which can
alone justify his claim to have something to say that lies
beyond the limits of the man of science. It is better that
he should make it clear at the outset why and in what sense
he holds that there is a subject-matter of enquiry which does
not consist of matters of fact, ascertainable by experiment
and observation, and what place he assigns to morals in this
subject-matter. In other words, at the risk of repelling
readers by presenting them first with the most difficult and
least plausible part of his doctrine, he should begin with
explaining why he holds a ' metaphysic of morals ' to be
possible and necessary ; the proper foundation, though not
the whole, of every system of Ethics.
This has not been the method commonly pursued by
English writers on the subject, and, in the face of present
tendencies, is likely to seem something of an anachronism.
To any one who by idiosyncrasy, or by the accident of his
position, is led to occupy himself with Moral Philosophy,
the temptation to treat his subject as a part of natural science
B 2
4 PROLEGOMENA TO ETHICS
is certainly a strong one. In so doing he can plead the
authority of eminent names and is sure of intelligent accept-
ance ; nor can he fail by patient enquiry to arrive at a theory
of some phenomena of human life, which, though it may
leave certain primary problems untouched, shall be not only
plausible but true so far as it goes. He can reckon securely
on having more to show for his life's work, when it comes
to an end, than if he spent himself on questions which he
may recognise as of real interest, but to which he will also
be aware that experiment and observation, strictly so called,
cannot aiford an answer. It thus would not be wonderful
that, with most enquirers and teachers, the interest once
taken in Moral Philosophy should be mainly transferred to
the physical science conveniently called Anthropology, even
if the insufficiency of the latter to deal with the most
important questions of Moral Philosophy were admitted.
This admission, however, has of late been fast coming
to be thought unnecessary. That a physical science of
Ethics is not intrinsically impossible, however difficult it
may be rendered by the complexity, and inaccessibility to
direct experiment, of its subject-matter ; that there are no
intelligible questions — no questions worth asking — as to
human life which would be beyond the reach of such a
science; this would seem to be the general opinion of
modern English ' culture,' so far as it is independent of
theological prepossessions. And it is natural that it should
be so. The questions raised for us by the Moral Philosophy
which in England we have inherited, are just sueh as to
invite a physical treatment. If it is the chief business of
the moralist to distinguish the nature and origin of the
pleasures and pains which are supposed to be the sole
objects of .human desire and aversion, to trace the effect
upon conduct of the impulses so constituted, and to ascer-
tain the several degrees in which different courses of action,
determined by anticipation of pleasure and pain, are actually
productive of the desired result; then the sooner the
methods of scientific experiment and observation are sub-
INTRODUCTION 5
stituted for vague guessing and an arbitrary interpretation
by each man of his own consciousness, the better it will
be. Ethics, so understood, becomes to all intents and
purposes a science of health, and the true moralist will be
the physiologist who, making the human physique his
specialty, takes a sufficiently wide view of his subject ; who
traces the influence of historical and political factors, or of
what it is now the fashion to call the 'social medium,' in
giving a specific character to those susceptibilities of plea-
sure and pain on which, according to the theory supposed,
the phenomena of human action depend.
3. There were two elements, indeed, in the system of
popular ethics inherited from the last century, which were
long thought incompatible with its complete reduction to
the form of a physical science. These were the doctrines
of free-will and of a moral sense. Each, however, was
understood in a way which suggested to the naturalist
a ready explanation of its supposed claim to lie beyond his
sphere. The moral sense, according to the accepted view,
was a specific susceptibility to pleasure or pain in the con-
templation of certain acts. What was the quality in the
acts which excited this pleasure or pain in the contempla-
tion of them ? If it were something in the conception of
which any originative function of the reason was implied,
then the existence of the moral sense would have meant
that there was a determining agent in the inner life of man,
of which no natural history could be given. But those
writers who had made most of the moral sense had been
very indefinite in their account of the quality in action to
which it was relative. The most consistent theory on the
subject was Hume's. According to him the pleasure of
moral sense is pleasure felt in the 'mere survey' of an act,
independently of any consequences of the act to the person
contemplating it; and that which occasions this pleasure
is the tendency of the act to bring pleasure to the agent
himself or to others'. Moral sense, in short, is a social
1 Treatise on Human Nature, Book III, Pt. i. §§ 1, -^j and Pt. iii. § i.
6 PROLEGOMENA TO ETHICS
sentiment either of satisfaction in the view of such conduct
as has been generally found to increase the pleasure or
diminish the pain of others, or of uneasiness in the reverse,
quite apart from Any expectation of personal advantage or
loss. It is thus properly not by the action of the person
feeling it, but by that of others, that it is excited. An act
of a man's own, necessarily proceeding, according to Hume,
from some desire for pleasure which it satisfies or fails to
satisfy, must have personal consequences for him, incom-
patible with that disinterested survey which alone yields
the pleasure or pain of moral sense, properly so called.
Sympathy, however, with the effect which he knows that
his act produces on the moral sense of others, may modify
the feeling which it causes to the doer of it. An act, in
gratification of some passion, which he would otherwise look
forward to as pleasant, may become so painful in anticipa-
tion from sympathy with the general uneasiness which he
knows would arise upon the contemplation of it that, without
any fear of punishment, he abstains from doing it.
4. Thus moral sense and sympathy jointly, as understood
by Hume, serve plausibly to explain the office ordinarily
ascribed to conscience, as the judge and possible controller
in each man of his own acts. At the same time the lines
are indicated along which a physical theory of ' conscience '
might be logically attempted. The problem which Hume
bequeathed to a successor who adopted his principles was
mainly to account for the twofold fact, that the mere survey
of actions as tending to produce pleasures in which the
contemplator will have no share, is yet a source of pleasure
to him ; and that, among the pleasures taken into account
in that estimate of the tendency of an action which deter-
mines the moral sentiment, are such as have no direct con-
nexion with the satisfaction of animal wants. A theory
which will account for this will also account for the affection
of the agent by sympathy with the sentiment which the
contemplation of his action excites in others. Can we find
any scientific warrant for believing in a process by which,
INTRODUCTION 7
out of susceptibility to pleasures incidental to the merely
animal life, there have grown those capacities for enjoyment
which we consider essential to general well-being, and those
social interests which not only make the contemplation of
general well-being an independent source of pleasure, but
also make the pleasure of exciting this pleasure — the pleasure
of satisfying the moral sentiment of others — an object of
desire so strong as in many cases to determine action ? If
we can, it would seem that we have given to our national
system of ethics — the ethics of moral sentiment — the solid
foundation of a natural science.
6. It is no wonder, therefore, that the evolutionists of our
day should claim to have given a wholly new character to
ethical enquiries. In Hume's time a philosopher who denied
the innateness of the moral sentiments, and held that they
must have a natural history, had only the limits of the indi-
vidual life within which to trace this history. These limits
did not give room enough for even a plausible derivation of
moral interests from animal wants. It is otherwise when the
history may be supposed to range over an indefinite number
of generations. The doctrine of hereditary transmission, it
is held, explains to us how susceptibilities of pleasure and
pain, of desire and aversion, of hope and fear, may be
handed down with gradually accumulated modiiications
which in time attain the full measure of the difference be-
tween the moral man and the greater ape. Through long
ages of interaction between the human organism and the
social medium in which it lives, there has been developed
that 'setisibility of principle which feels a stain like a wound;'
that faculty of moral intuition which not only pronounces
unerringly on the social tendencies of the commoner forms
of human action, but enables us in some measure to see our-
selves as others see us ; that civil spirit through which the
promptings of personal passion are controlled even in the
individual by the larger vision and calmer interest of society.
Thus it would seem that for the barren speculation of the
old metaphysical ethics we should seek a substitute in a
8 PROLEGOMENA TO ETHICS
scientific 'Culturgeschichte'; in a natural history of man
conducted on the same method as an enquiry into any
other form of life which cannot be reduced to the operation
of strictly mechanical laws. For the later stages of this
history we have, of course, abundant materials in the actual
monuments of human culture — linguistic, literary, and legal
— and these, the physiologist may say, have yet to be con-
sidered in connexion with the data which his own science
furnishes. It is true that, however far they carry us back,
however great the variations of moral sentiment to which
they testify, they do not bring us to a state of things in
which the essential conditions of that sentiment were absent.
The most primitive man they exhibit to us is already con-
scious of his own good as conditioned by that of others,
already capable of recognising an obligation. But the
theory of descent and evolution opens up a vista of possi-
bilities beyond the facts, so far ascertained, of human
history, and suggests an enquiry into the antecedents of
the moralised man based on other data than the records
which he has left of himself. Such enquiry, it is thought,
will in time give us the means of reducing the moral sus-
ceptibilities of man to the rank of ordinary physical facts,
parts of one system, and intelligible by the same methods,
with all the natural phenomena which we are learning to
know. Man will then have his ascertained place in nature,
as perhaps the noblest of the animals, but an animal still.
6. When the moral sentiment has been explained on the
principles of natural science, free-will is not likely to be
regarded as presenting any serious obstacle to the same
mode of treatment. By those of our national philosophers
who have asserted its existence, it has generally been under-
stood as a faculty of determining action apart from deter-
mination by motives ; as a power, distinct alike from reason
and from desire, which chooses between motives without
being itself dependent on any motive. So crude a notion
must long ago have given way before the questions of
science, if there had not been a practical conviction behind
INTRODUCTION 9
it which it failed fairly to interpret. What after all, it is
asked, is any faculty but an hypostatised abstraction ? A
faculty is no more than a possibility. Whatever happens
implies no doubt a possibility of its happening. Voluntary
action implies a possibility of voluntary action, just as the
motion of a billiard-ball implies a possibility of that motion ;
but the possibility in each is determined by definite con-
ditions. In the case of the billiard-ball these conditions, or
some of them, are so obvious that we do not think of
treating the possibility of the ball's moving as a faculty
inherent in the ball, and of ascribing the ball's motion to
this faculty as its cause ; although, as we know, when the
causes of a motion are less apparent, the uninstructed are
quite ready to ascribe it to a faculty or power in the moving
body. In ascribing any voluntary action to a faculty in
man, we are doing, it is said, just the same as in ascribing
any particular motion to a faculty in the moving body.
The fact is the particular voluntary action, which must be
possible, no doubt, or it would not be done, but of which
the real possibility consists in the assemblage of conditions
which make up its cause. To include any faculty of action
among these is merely to express our ignorance of what
they are or our unwillingness to examine them. Among
them, it is true, is the wish which happens to be predomi-
nant in the agent at the moment of action ; but this, too,
has its definite conditions in the circumstances of the case
and the motives operating on the agent. It may be owing
to the character of the agent that one of these motives gets
' the upper hand ; but his character again is only a name
for an assemblage of conditions, of which it may be scarcely
possible for us completely to trace the antecedents, but
which we are not on that account justified in assigning to
a cause that is no cause, but merely a verbal substantiation
of the abstraction of our ignorance. Human freedom must
be understood in some different sense from that with which
our anthropologists are familiar, if it is to stand in the way
of the scientific impulse to naturalise the moral man.
lo PROLEGOMENA TO ETHICS
7. We will suppose then that a theory has been formed
which professes to explain, on the method of a natural
history conducted according to the principle of evolution,
the process by which the human animal has come, according
to the' terminology in vogue, to exhibit the phenomena of
a moral life — to have a conscience, to feel remorse, to pursue
ideals, to be capable of education through appeals to the
sense of honour and of shame, to be conscious of anta-
gonism between the common and private good, and even
sometimes to prefer the former. It has generally been
expected of a moralist, however, that he should explain not
only how men do act, but how they should act : and as a
matter of fact we find that those who regard the process of
man's natural development most strictly as a merely natural
one are as forward as any to propound rules of living, to
which they conceive that, according to their view of the in-
fluences which make him what he is, man ought to conform.
The natural science of man is to them the basis of a practi-
cal art. They seek to discover what are the laws — the
modes of operation of natural forces — under which we have
come to be what we are, in order that they may counsel us
how to seek our happiness by living according to those laws.
Now it is obvious that to a being who is simply a result
of natural forces an injunction to conform to their laws
is unmeaning. It implies that there is something in him
independent of those forces, which may determine the rela-
tion in which he shall stand to them. A philosopher, then,
who would reconstruct our ethical systems in conformity
with the doctrines of evolution and descent, if he would
be consistent, must deal less scrupulously with them than
perhaps any one has yet been found to do. If he has the
courage of his principles, having reduced the speculative
part of them to a natural science, he must abolish the
practical or preceptive part altogether. Instead, for instance,
of telling men of a greatest sum of pleasures which they
ought to seek, and which by acting in the light of a true
insight into natural laws they may attain, he will content
INTRODUCTION II
himself with ascertaining, so far as he can, whether such
and such a temperament under such and such circumstances
yields more frequent, durable, and intense pleasures than
such another temperament under such other circumstances.
He will not mock the misery of him who fails, nor flatter
the self-complacency of him who prospers, by speaking of
a happiness that is to be obtained by conformity to the laws
of nature, when he knows that, according to his own prin-
ciples, it is a struggle for existence determined by those laws
which has brought the one to his wretchedness and the other
to his contentment. He will rather set himself to show how
the phraseology of 'ought' and 'ought not,' the belief in
a good attainable by all, the consciousness of something
that should be though it is not, may according to his philo-
sophy be accounted for. Nor, if he has persuaded himself
that the human consciousness, as it is, can be physically
accounted for, will he find any further difficulty in thus ex-
plaining that language of moral injunction which forms so
large an element in its expression. He will probably trace
this language to the joint action of two factors — to the habit
of submission to the commands of a physical or political
superior, surviving the commands themselves and the me-
mory of them, combined with that constant though ineffec-
tual wish for a condition of life other than his own, which is
natural to a being who looks before and after over perpetual
alternations of pleasure and pain.
8. The elimination of ethics, then, as a system of precepts,
involves no intrinsic difficulties other than those involved
in the admission of a natural science that can account for
the moralisation of man. The discovery, however, that our
assertions of moral obligation are merely the expression of
an ineffectual wish to be better off than we are, or are due
to the survival of habits originally enforced by physical fear,
but of which the origin is forgotten, is of a kind to give us
pause. It logically carries with it the conclusion, however
the conclusion may be disguised, that, in inciting ourselves
or others to do anything because it ought to be done, we
12 PROLEGOMENA TO ETHICS
are at best making use of a serviceable illusion. And when
this consequence is found to follow logically from the con-
ception of man as in his moral attributes a subject of natural
science, it may lead to a reconsideration of a doctrine which
would otherwise have been taken for granted as the most
important outcome of modern enlightenment. As the first
charm of accounting for what has previously seemed the
mystery of our moral nature passes away, and the spirit of
criticism returns, we cannot but enquire whether a being
that was merely a result of natural forces could form a theory
of those forces as explaining himself. We have to return
once more to that analysis of the conditions of knowledge,
which forms the basis of all Critical Philosophy whether
called by the name of Kant or no, and to ask whether the
experience of connected matters of fact, which in its metho-
dical expression we call science, does not presuppose a prin-
ciple which is not itself any one or number of such matters
of fact, or their result.
Can the knowledge of nature be itself a part or product
of nature, in that sense of nature in which it is said to be
an object of knowledge ? This is our first question. If it
is answered in the negative, we shall at least have satisfied
ourselves that man, in respect of the function called know-
ledge, is not merely a child of nature. We shall have
ascertained the presence in him of a principle not natural,
and a specific function of this principle in rendering know-
ledge possible. The way will then be so far cleared for the
further question which leads us, in the language of Kant,
from the Critique of Speculative to that of Practical Reason :
the question whether the same principle has not another
expression than that which appears in the determination of
experience and through it in our knowledge of a world — an
expression which consists in the consciousness of a moral
ideal and the determination of human action thereby.
BOOK I
METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE
CHAPTER I
THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN KNOWLEDGE AND IN NATURE
9. The question, Can the knowledge of nature be itself
a part or product of nature ? must not be confused with that
commonly supposed to be at issue between spiritualists and
materialists. It is one which equally remains to be put, in
whatever way we understand the relation between body and
mind. We may have admitted most unreservedly that all the
so-called functions of the soul are materially conditioned, but
the question how there come to be for us those objects of
consciousness, called matter and motion, on which we sup-
pose the operations of sense and desire and thought to be
dependent, will still remain to be answered. If it could be
admitted that matter and motion had an existence in them-
selves, or otherwise than as related to a consciousness, it
would still not be by such matter and motion, but by the
matter and motion which we know, that the functions of the
soul, or anything else, can for us be explained. Nothing can
be known by help of reference to the unknown. But matter
and motion, just so far as known, consist in, or are deter-
mined by, relations between the objects of that connected
consciousness which we call experience. If we take any
definition of matter, any account of its ' necessary qualities,'
and abstract from it all that consists in a statement of
relations between facts in the way of feeling, or between
objects that we present to ourselves as sources of feeling, we
shall find that there is nothing left. Motion, in like manner,
has no meaning except such as is derived from a synthesis
of the different positions successively held by one and the
same body ; and we shall try in vain to render an account to
14 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
ourselves of position or succession, of a body or its identity,
except as expressing relations of what is contained in
experience, through which alone that content possesses a
definite character and becomes a connected whole.
What then is the source of these relations, as relations of
the experienced, in other words, of that which exists for con-
sciousness ? What is the principle of union which renders
them possible ? Clearly it cannot itself be conditioned by any
of the relations which result from its combining and unifying
action. Being that which so organises experience that the
relations expressed by our definitions of matter and motion
arise therein, it cannot itself be determined by those rela-
tions. It cannot be a matter or motion. However rigidly,
therefore, we may exclude from our explanations of pheno-
mena all causes that are not reducible to matter and motion,
however fully we may admit that the nature which we know
or may know is knowable only under strictly physical laws,
we are none the less in effect asserting the existence of some-
thing which, as the source of a connected experience, renders
both the nature that we know and our knowledge of it pos-
sible, but is not itself physically conditioned. We may decide
all the questions that have been debated between materialists
and spiritualists as to the explanation of particular facts in
favour of the former, but the possibility of explaining them
at all will still remain to be explained. We shall still be
logically bound to admit that in a man who can know
a nature — for whom there is a ' cosmos of experience ' ' — there
is a principle which is not natural and which cannot without
a varepov nporepovht explained as we explain the facts of nature.
10. There are certain accepted doctrines of modern philo-
sophy— e.g., that knowledge is only of phenomena, not of
anything unrelated to consciousness, and that object and
subject are correlative — from which this conclusion seems to
follow so inevitably, that any one who has adopted it must
enquire anxiously why it is not more generally recognised.
If nothing can enter into knowledge that is unrelated to
' I borrow the phrase from Mr. G. H. Lewes.
CH. l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN KNOWLEDGE 15
consciousness ; if relation to a subject is necessary to make
an object, so that an object which no consciousness pre-
sented to itself would not be an object at all; it is as
difficult to see how the principle of unity, through which
phenomena become the connected system called the world
of experience, can be found elsewhere than in consciousness,
as it is to see how the consciousness exercising such a
function can be a part of -the world which it thus at least
co-operates in making; how it can be a phenomenon among
the phenomena which it unites into a knowledge. Why then
do our most enlightened interpreters of nature take it as a
matter of course that the principle of unity in the world of our
experience is something which, whatever else it is — and they
can say nothing else of it — is at any rate the negation of
consciousness, and that consciousness itself is a phenomenon
or group of phenomena in which this 'nature' exhibits itself
or results? And why is it that, when we have professedly
discarded this doctrine, we still iind it to a great extent con-
trolling our ordinary, thoughts ? There must be reasons for
this inconsistency, which should be duly considered if we
would understand what we are about in maintaining that
there is a sense in which man is related to nature as its author,
as well as one in which he is related to it as its child.
11. The reader is probably acquainted with Kant's dictum
that 'the understanding makes nature.' It gives no doubt
a somewhat startling expression to the revolution in philo-
sophy which Kant believed himself to have introduced, and
which he compared to the change effected by the Copernican
theory in men's conception of the relative positions of the
earth and the sun. When we enquire, however, into the
precise sense in which Kant used the expression, we find
that its meaning is subject to a qualification which testifies
to the difficulty experienced by Kant himself in carrying out
the doctrine which the words seemed to convey. 'Macht
zwar der Verstand die Natur, aber er schafft sie nicht.' The
understanding ' makes ' nature, but out of a material which
it does not make. That material, according to Kant, con-
l6 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
sists in phenomena or ' data ' of sensibility, given under the
so-called forms of intuition, space and time. This apparent
ascription of nature to a twofold origin — an origin in under-
standing in respect of its form as a nature, as a single system
of experience ; an origin elsewhere in respect of the 'matter'
which through the action of understanding becomes a na-
ture— cannot but strike us as unsatisfactory. Perhaps it may
not be a doctrine in which we can permanently acquiesce,
but meanwhile it represents fairly enough on its two sides the
considerations which on the one hand lead us to regard
nature as existing only in relation to thought, and those on
the other which seem obstinately opposed to such a view.
12. To say with Kant that the understanding is the prin-
ciple of objectivity, that only through understanding is there
for us an objective world, is sure to seem at first sight the
extreme of perversity. We have come to think of the under-
standing as specially an agency of our own, and of the
objective world as specially that which is presented to us
independently of any such agency ; as that which we find
and do not make, and by which we have to correct the
fictions of our own minds. When we ask, however, whether
any impression is or represents anything 'real and objective,'
what exactly does the. question mean, and how do we set
about answering it? It is not equivalent to a question
whether a feeling is felt. Some feeling must be felt in order
to the possibility of the question being raised at all. It is
a question whether a given feeling is what it is taken to be ;
or, in other words, whether it is related as it seems to be
related. It may be objected indeed that, though some feeling
or other mlist be felt in order to give any meaning to the
question as to the objectivity of the impression or its cor-
respondence with reality, yet still this question may and often
does mean merely whether a particular feeling is felt. This
is true; but a particular feeling is a feeling related in a
certain way, and the question whether a particular feeling is
really felt is always translatable into the form given — Is a
C^. l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN KNOWLEDGE t^
feeling, which is undoubtedly felt, really related as some one
thinking about it takes it to be ? If an engine-driver, under
certain conditions, permanent with him or temporary, ' sees
a signal wrong,' as we say, his disordered vision has its own
reality just as much as if he saw right. There are relations
between combinations of moving particles on the one side
and his visual organs on the other, between the present state
of the latter and certain determining conditions, between
the immediate sensible effect and the secondary impressions
which it in turn excites, as full and definite — with sufficient
enquiry and opportunity, as ascertainable — as in any case
of normal vision. There is as much reality in the one case
as in the other, but it is not the same reality : /. e., it does
not consist in the same relations. The engine-driver mistakes
the effect of one set of relations for that of another, one
reality for another, and hence his error in action. He may
be quite innocent of a scientific theory of vision, but he
objectifies his sensations. He interprets them as related in
a certain way, and as always the same in the same relations;
or, to use an equivalent but more famihar expression, as
signs of objects from which he distinguishes his feelings and
by which he explains them. Were this not the case, his
vision might be normal or abnormal, but he would be in-
capable of mistaking one kind of reality for another, since
he would have no conception of reality at all.
13. The terms ' real ' and ' objective,' then, have no
meaning except for a consciousness which presents its
experiences to itself as determined by relations, and at the
same time conceives a single and unalterable order of
relations determining them, with which its temporary pre-
sentation, as each experience occurs, of the relations
determining it may be contrasted. For such a conscious-
ness, perpetually altering its views of the relations deter-
mining any experience under the necessity of combining
them in one system with other recognised relations, and for
such a consciousness only, there is significance in the
judgment that any experience seems to be so and so, i.e.,
c
l8 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
to be related in a certain way, but really is otherwise related.
We shall have afterwards [§19 and foil.] to consider the
question whether the consciousness, for which alone this
contrast of the real and the apparent is possible, has any-
thing to do with the establishment of the relations in which
it conceives reality to consist — whether the conception of
reality has any identity with the act by which reality is
constituted. But even if this latter question is waived or
answered in the negative, there will still be an important
sense in which understanding, or consciousness as acting in
the manner described, may be said to be the principle of
objectivity. It will be through it that there is for us an
objective world ; through it that we conceive an order of
nature, with the unity of which we must reconcile our
interpretations of phenomena, if they are to be other than
' subjective ' illusions.
14. Of course it may very well be that many a man would
disclaim any such conception, who is yet constantly acting
upon the distinction between what he believes to be mere
appearance and what he believes to be reality. But want
of familiarity with the abstract expression of a conception,
want of ability to analyse it, is no evidence that the con-
ception is inoperative upon the experience of the person
who, from this want of familiarity or ability, would say, if he
were asked, that he had it not or knew not what it meant.
The proof of the necessity of certain ideas has never been
supposed, by any one who knew what he was 'about, to rest
upon the fact that every one was aware of having them.
Such a proof, to say nothing of the well-worked appeal to
savages or the uneducated, would be at the mercy of every
lively gentleman who was pleased to say that he searched
his breast for such ideas in vain. The necessity of a con-
ception, as distinct from the logical (or rather rhetorical)
necessity of a conclusion contained in premisses already
conceded, means that it is necessary to the experience with-
out which there would not for us be a world at all \ and
there can be neither proof nor disproof of such necessity as
CH. l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN KNOWLEDGE 19
is claimed for any conception, but through analysis of the
conditions which render this experience possible. Unless
the accuracy or sufficiency of the analysis can be disputed,
the necessary character of the ideas which it exhibits as
operative in the formation of experience, is unaffected by
the inability of any one to recognise them in that abstract
form to which the analysis reduces them, but which, just
because they are operative in a concrete experience, is not
the form of their familiar use.
Thus a man who is quite at home with the distinction
between facts and fancies may think it strange to be told
that the distinction implies a conception of the world as
a single system of relations ; that this is the conception on
the strength of which he constantly sets aside as fancy what
he had taken to be fact, because he finds that the supposed
relations, which for him formed the nature of the fact, are
not such as can be combined with others that he recognises
in one intelligible system. Such language may convey no
meaning to him, but the question will still remain whether
upon reflection the distinction can be otherwise accounted
for. When we analyse our idea of matter of fact, can we
express it except as an idea of a relation which is always the
same between the same objects ; or our idea of an object
except as that which is always the same in the same
relations ? And does not each expression imply the idea of
a world as a single and eternal system of related elements,
which may be related with endless diversity but must de
related still ? If we may properly call the consciousness
which yields this idea ' understanding,' are we not entitled
to say that understanding is the source of there being for us
an objective world, that it is the principle of objectivity ?
15. So far we have only reached the conclusion that
a conception, to which understanding is related as faculty
to function, is the condition of our ability to distinguish
areal from the unreal, matter of fact from illusion. It will
be said perhaps that so much pains need not have been
spent on establishing a proposition which in effect merely
c 2
20 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bK. I
tells us that without a conception of an order of nature we
could not conceive an order of nature. Is not this, it may
be asked, either an identical proposition or untrue — an
identical proposition, if understood strictly as thus put;
untrue, if taken to mean that the conception of an order of
nature does not admit of being generated out of materials
other than itself? Now it is just the difficulties in the way
of explaining the origin of the conception in question out
of anything else than judgments which presuppose it, that
we wish to exhibit. They are the difficulties which beset
any theory that would treat the knowledge of nature as
itself the result of natural processes. It is through experience
that every such theory must suppose the resulting know-
ledge to be produced. But experience, as most students
of philosophy must now be aware, is a term used in very
different senses. In this case an experience which is to
yield the required result must not be merely an experience
in the sense in which, for instance, a plant might be said to
experience a succession of atmospheric or chemical changes,
or in which we ourselves pass through a definite physical
experience during sleep or in respect of the numberless
events which affect us but of which we are not aware. Such
an experience may no doubt gradually alter to any extent
the mode in which the physical organism reacts upon
stimulus. It may be the condition of its becoming organic
to intellectual processes, but between it and experience of
the kind which is to yield a knowledge of nature there is
a chasm which no one, except by confusion of speech, has
attempted to fill. Or to speak more precisely, between the
two senses of experience there is all the difference that exists
between change and consciousness of change.
16. Experience of the latter kind must be experience of
matters of fact recognised as such. It is possible, no doubt
to imagine a psychological history of this experience, and
to trace it back to a stage in which the distinction between
fact and fancy is not yet formally recognised. But there is
a limit to this process. An experience which distinguishes
CH.l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN KNOWLEDGE 21
fact from fancy cannot be developed out of one which is
not, in some form or other, a consciousness of events as
related or as a series of changes. It has commonly, and
with much probability, been held that the occurrence of the
unexpected, by exciting distrust in previously established
associations of ideas, has at any rate a large share in gene-
. rating the distinction of what seems from what is. But the
shock of surprise is one thing, the correction of a belief
quite another. Unless there were already a consciousness
alike of the events, of which the ideas have become as-
sociated, as a related series, and of the newly observed
event as a member of the same, the unfamiliar event might
cause a disturbance of the nerves or the ' psychoplasm,' but
there would neither be an incorrect belief as to an order of
events to be corrected by it, nor any such correlation of the
newly observed event with what had been observed before
as could suggest a correction. But a consciousness of
events as a related series — experience in the most elemen-
tary form in which it can be the beginning of knowledge —
has not any element of identity with, and therefore cannot
properly be said to be developed out of, a mere series of
related events, of successive modifications of body or soul,
such as is experience in the former of the senses spoken of.
No one and no number of a series of related events can be
the consciousness of the series as related. Nor can any
product of the series be so either. Even if this product
could be anything else than a further event, it could at any
rate only be something that supervenes at a certain stage
upon such of the events as have so far elapsed. But a con-
sciousness of certain events cannot be anything that thus
succeeds them. It must be equally present to all the events
of which it is the consciousness. For this reason an in-
telligent experience, or experience as the source of know-
ledge, can neither be constituted by events of which it is
the experience, nor be a product of them.
17. ' Perhaps not/ it may be replied, ' but may it not be
a product oi previous events ? ' If it is so, a series of events
22 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
of which there is no conscious experience must be supposed
to produce a consciousness of another series. On any- other
supposition the difficulty is only postponed. For if the
series of events which produces a certain consciousness of
other events is one of which there is a consciousness, this
consciousness, not being explicable as the product of the
events of which it is the consciousness, will have in turn to
be referred to a prior series of events ; and ultimately there
will be no alternative between the admission of a conscious-
ness which is not a product of events at all and the supposi-
tion stated — the supposition that the primary consciousness
of events results from a series of events of which there is no
consciousness. But this supposition, when we think of it,
turns out to be a concatenation of words to which no
possible connexion of ideas corresponds. It asserts a rela-
tion of cause and effect, in which the supposed cause lacks
all the characteristics of a cause. It may be questioned
whether we can admit anything as a cause which does not
explain its supposed effect, or is not equivalent to the con-
ditions into which the effect may be analysed. But granting
that we may, a cause must at least be that to which experi-
ence testifies as the uniform antecedent of the effect. Now
a series of events of which there is no consciousness is
certainly not a set of conditions into which consciousness
can be analysed. And as little can it be an antecedent
uniformly associated with consciousness in experience, for
events of which there is no consciousness cannot be within
experience at all.
18. It seems necessary, then, to admit that experience, in
the sense of a consciousness of events as a related series —
and in no other sense can it help to account for the know-
ledge of an order of nature — cannot be explained by any
natural history, properly so called. It is not a product of
a series of events. It does not arise out of materials other
than itself. It is not developed by a natural process out of
other forms of natural existence. Given such a conscious-
ness, the scientific conception of nature, no less than the
CH. l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 23
every-day distinction between fact and fancy, between objec-
tive reality and subjective illusion, can be exhibited as
a development of it, for there is an assignable element of
identity between the two. But between the consciousness
itself on the one hand, and on the other anything determined
by the relations under which a nature is presented to con-
sciousness, no process of development, because no com-
munity, can be really traced. JJaturg, with all that belongs
to it, is a process of change : change on a uniform method,
no doubt, but change still. All the relations under which
we know it are relations in the way of change or by which
change is determined. But neither can any process of change
yield a consciousness of itself, which, in order to be a con-
sciousness of the change, must be equally present to all stages
of the change ; nor can any consciousness of change, since the
whole of it must be present at once, be itself a process of
change. There may be a change into a state of consciousness
of change, and a change out of it, on the part of this man
or that ; but within the consciousness itself there can be no
change, because no relation of before and after, of here and
there, between its constituent members — between the pre-
sentation, for instance, of point A and that of point B in the
process which forms the object of the consciousness.
19. From the above considerations thus much at any rate
would seem to follow : that a form of consciousness, which
we cannot explain as of natural origin, is necessary to our
conceiving an order of nature, an objective world of fact
from which illusion may be distinguished. In other words,
an understanding — for that term seems as fit as any other
to denote the principle of consciousness in question— irre-
ducible to anything else, ' makes nature ' for us, in the sense
of enabling us to conceive that there is such a thing. Now
that which the understanding thus presents to itself consists,
as we have seen, in certain relations regarded as forming
a single system. The next question, then, will be whether
understanding can be held to ' make nature ' in the further
24 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
sense that it is the source, or at any rate a condition, of
there being these relations. If it cannot, we are left in the
awkward position of having to suppose that, while the con-
ception of an order of nature on the one side, and that
order itself on the other, are of diiiferent and independent
origin, . there is yet some unaccountable pre-established
harmony through which there comes to be such an order
corresponding to our conception of it. This indeed might
be urged as a reason for seeking some way of escape from
the conclusion at which we have just arrived. But before
we renew an attempt which has often been made and failed,
let us see whether the objections to the other alternative —
to the view that the understanding which presents an order
of nature to us is in principle one with an understanding
which constitutes that order itself — have really the cogency
which common-sense seems to ascribe to them.
20. The traditional philosophy of common-sense, we
shall find, speaks upon the point with an ambiguity which
affords a presumption of its involving more difficulty than
might at first sight appear. No one is more emphatic than
Locke in opposing what is real to what we ' make for our-
selves,' the work of nature to the work of the mind. Simple
ideas or sensations we certainly do not ' make for ourselves.'
They therefore and the matter supposed to cause them are,
according to Locke, real '. But relations are neither simple
ideas nor their material archetypes. They therefore, as
Locke explicitly holds, fall under the head of the work o£
the mind, which is opposed to the real '. But if we take him
at his word and exclude from what we" have considered real
all qualities constituted by relation, we find that none are left.
Without relation any simple idea would be undistinguished
from other simple ideas, undetermined by its surroundings
in the cosmos of experience. It would thus be unqualified
itself, and consequently could afford no qualification of the
material archetype, which yet according to Locke we only
' Essay concerning Human Understanding, II. xii. i.
» Ibid. II. XXV. 8.
CH.l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 25
know through it or, if otherwise, as the subject of those
' primary qualities ' which demonstrably consist in relations ^.
In. short, the admission of the antithesis between the real
and the work of the mind, and the admission that relation
is the work of the mind, put together, involve the conclusion
that nothing is real of which anything can be said.
Our ordinary way out of the difficulty consists in keeping
the two admissions apart, without, however, surrendering
either. We maintain the opposition between the real and
the work of the mind exactly as it was asserted by Locke ;
and if we are less explicit in accounting relations to be the
work of the mind, it is not because we have any theory of
the real which more logically admits them than does Locke's.
Yet we have no scruple in accepting duly verified know-
ledge as representing reality, though what is known consists
in nothing else than relations. We neither ask ourselves
how it can be that a knowledge of relations should be a
knowledge of reality, if the real is genuinely simple sensa-
tion or that which copies itself in simple sensation, nor what
other account we can give of the real without qualifying
the antithesis between the work of the mind and it. It is
in fact from our adoption of this antithesis that we come to
accept that identification of the real with simple sensation
or its archetype which, as Locke was aware, implies the
unreality of relations. But when in our processes of know-
ledge we have virtually recognised relations as constituting
the very essence of reality, we do not reconsider our defini-
tion of the real in the light of this recognition. We do not
lay our procedure in what we regard as knowledge of the
real alongside Locke's view of the real, which is also ours,
so as to ask whether they are consistent with each other.
And hence we are not led to call in question the antithesis
on which that view depends.
21. As it is a serious matter, however, to accept a view
of the real which such a thinker as Locke could not
reconcile with the reality of relations, and which logically
' Essay concerning Human Understanding, II. viii. 15 and 23 ; xxx. 2.
26 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
implies that knowledge is not of the real ; and as on the
other hand there is something in the opposition between
the real and the work of the mind which seems to satisfy
an imperative demand of common-sense ; it becomes im-
portant to enquire whether we interpret that demand aright.
Is there not a conception of the real behind the opposition
in question, which seems to require us to accept it, but
which in truth we misinterpret in doing so ?
We constantly find Locke falling back on the considera-
tion that of simple ideas ' we cannot make one to ourselves.'
They 'force themselves upon us whether we will or no.'
It is this which entitles them in his eyes to be accounted
real. 'The work of the mind,' on the other hand, he
considers arbitrary. A man has but to think, and he can
make ideas of relation for himself as he pleases. Locke
thus indicates what we may call the operative conception —
operative as governing the action of our intelligence — which
underlies the opposition between the real and the work of
the mind. This is the conception which we have described
already as that of a single and unalterable system of rela-
tions. It is not the work of the mind, as such, that we
instinctively oppose to the real, but the work of the mind
as assumed to be arbitrary and irregularly changeable.
22. In truth, however, there is no such thing. The very
question, What is the real ? — which we seem to answer by
help of this opposition— is a misleading one, so far as it
implies that there is something else from which the real can
be distinguished. We are apt to make merry over the crude
logic of Plato in supposing that there are objects, described
as iiTj ovra, which stand in the same relation to ignorance as
Ta oi>Ta to knowledge, and other objects, described as ra
lUTa^v, which stand in a corresponding relation to mere
opinion. Of this fallacy, as of most others that are to be
found in him, Plato himself supplies the correction, but
much of our language about the real implies that we are
ourselves its victims. If there is a valid opposition between
the work of the mind and something else which is not the
CH.l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 27
work of the mind, the one must still be just as real as the
other. Of two alternatives, one. Either ' the work of the
mind' is a name for nothing, expressing a mere privation
or indeterminateness, a mere absence of qualities — in which
case nothing is conveyed by the proposition which opposes
the real or anything else to it : or, on the other hand, if it
has qualities and relations of its own, then it is just as real
as anything else. Through not understanding the relations
which determine the one kind of object — that ascribed to
the work of the mind — as distinct from those which deter-
mine the other — that ascribed to some other agency — we
may confuse the two kinds of object. We may take what
is really of the one kind to be really of the other. But this
is not a confusion of the real with the unreal. The very
confusion itself, the mistake of supposing what is related in
one way to be related in another, has its own reality. It
has its history, its place in the development of a man's
mind, its causes and effects ; and, as so determined, it is as
real as anything else.
23. It is thus in vain that we seek to define the real by
finding, either in the work of the mind or elsewhere, an
unreal to which it may be opposed. Is there, then, no
meaning in an opposition which is constantly on our
tongues ? Undoubtedly that which any event seems to us
to be may be — nay always is — more or less different from
what it really is. The relations by which we judge it to be
determined are not, or at any rate fall short of, those by
which it is really determined. But this is a distinction
between one particular reality and another; not between
a real, as such or as a whole, and an unreal, as such or as
a whole. The illusive appearance, as opposed to the reality,
of any event is what that event really is not ; but at the
same time it really is something. It is real, not indeed
with the particular reality which the subject of the illusion
ascribes to it, but with a reality which a superior intelligence
might understand. The relations by which, in a false belief
as to a matter of fact, we suppose the event to be determined,
28 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
are not non-existent. They are really objects of a con-
ceiving consciousness. As arising out of the action of such
a consciousness, as constituents of a world which it presents
to itself, they are no less real than are the actual conditions
of the event which is thought to be, but is not really, deter-
mined by them. It is when we reflect on the judgments in
which we are perpetually deciding that what has previously
been taken to be the reality of a particular event is a mere
appearance, i.e., not the reality of that particular event —
or rather when we reflect on the language in which those
judgments have been expressed — that we come to speak of
the real, as an abstract universal, in contrast with another
abstract universal, the unreal. Thus for a contrast which is
in truth a contrast between two acts of judgment — the act of
judging an event to be determined by certain relations which,
according to the order of the universe, do determine it, and
that of judging it to be determined by relations other than
these — we substitute another, which exists merely in words,
but to which we fancy that we give a meaning by identifying
the unreal with the work of the mind, as opposed to a real
which has some other origin, we cannot say what.
24. What we have so far sought to show has been (i),
generally, that an attempt to define the real by distinction
from anything else is necessarily futile — the result of a false
abstraction from the distinction between the real nature of
one event or object and that of another — and (2), specially,
that the antithesis between the real and the work of the
mind is invalid, not because the real is the work of the
mind — whether it is so or not we have yet to enquire — but
because the work of the mind is real. The ' mere idea * of
a hundred thalers, to use the familiar instance, is no doubt
quite different from the possession of them, not because it
is unreal, but because the relations which form the real
nature of the idea are different from those which form the
real nature of the possession.
So much it was necessary to show, in order that the
enquiry, whether it is due to 'understanding' not merely
CH.i] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 29
that we are able to conceive a nature but that there is such a
thing as nature at all, might not be prejudiced by a precon-
ception which would make it seem equivalent to an enquiry
whether the real could be the work of the unreal. If now
from the futile question, What is the real ? which we can only
answer by saying that the real is everything, we pass to one
more hopeful — How do we decide whether any particular
event or object is really what it seems to be, or whether our
belief about it is true ? — the answer must be that we do so by
testing the unalterableness of the qualities which we ascribe
to it, or which form its apparent nature. A certain hill
appears to-day to be near : yesterday under different con-
ditions of atmosphere it appeared to be remote. But the
real nature of the event which took place in yesterday's ap-
pearance cannot, we judge, thus change. What it was really,
it was unalterably. There may have been a change from that
appearance to another, but not a change of or in whatever
was the reality of the appearance. The event of yesterday's
appearance, then, must have been determined by conditions
other than those which determine to-day's. But if both
appearances depended solely on the position of the hill, they
would be determined by the same conditions. Therefore we
must have been wrong in believing the hill to be so remote
as we believed it to be yesterday, or in believing it to be so
near as we believed it to be to-day, or in both beliefs : wrong
in respect of the relation which we supposed to exist between
the several appearances and the distance of the hill.
25. With sufficient time and command of detail it would not
be difficult to show how the conviction here illustrated, that
whatever anything is really it is unalterably, regulates equally
our most primitive and our most developed judgments of
reality — the every-day supposition of there being a multitude
of separate things which remain the same in themselves while
their appearances to us alter, and the scientific quest for
uniformity or unalterableness in a law of universal change.
Through a slight confusion of thought and expression, this
conviction may issue either in the sensational atomism of
30 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bK. I
Locke or in the material atomism of popular science. A sen-
sation is the unalterable effect of its conditions, whatever
those conditions may be. It is unalterably related to other
sensations. Our opinion about its conditions or relations
may vary, but not the conditions or relations themselves, or
the sensation determined by them. Hence when a man
looks into his breast, as Locke bids him do, simple feelings —
feelings apart from intellectual interpretations and combina-
tions of them — seem alone unalterable in contrast with our
judgments about them. In truth the unalterableness be-
longs not to any simple feeling, for our feelings change every
moment upon us, but, as we have said, to the relation be-
tween it and its conditions or between it and other feelings ;
and such a relation is neither itself a feeling nor represented
in our consciousness by a feeling. This distinction, how-
ever, is overlooked. The unalterableness of the fact that
a certain feeling is felt under certain conditions, is ascribed to
the simple feeling, or simple idea, as such : and unalterable-
ness being the test by which we ascertain whether what we
have believed to be the nature of any event is really so or
not, the simple feeling, which by itself cannot properly be
said to be really anything, comes to be regarded either as
alone real, according to the ideal form of sensationalism, or
as alone representing an external reality, according to the
materialistic form of the same doctrine.
On the other hand, reflection upon the ' perpetual flux ' of
sensation suggests the view that it is not real in the same
sense as its material conditions. The old dictum ascribed
to DemOCritUS — voixw yKvKV koI vofia mKpov, vofito depfjiov, v6na>
ijruxpov, vofia xp°''h' *"5 ^^ aTojia Koi Ktvov^ — expresses a way
of thinking into which we often fall. The reality which in
truth lies in the relations, according to one law or system
of relation, between feelings and their material conditions —
not in the material conditions abstracted from the feelings
any more than in the feelings abstracted from their material
' Sweet, bitter, hot, cold, colour, are by convention ; only atoms
end void are real.
CH.l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 31
conditions — we are apt to ascribe exclusively to the latter.
We think obscurely of matter and motion as real in some
way in which nothing else is. Nor do we stop here. The
demand for unalterableness in what we believe to be real,
when once we are off the right track of seeking it in a
uniform law of change, leads us to suppose that the ' reality
of things ' is only reached when we have penetrated to
atoms which in all changes of their motion and distribution
remain intrinsically the same.
26. Let us consider now how we stand. We have rejected
the question, What is or constitutes the real ? as intrinsically
unmeaning, because it could only be answered by a distinc-
tion which would imply that there was something unreal.
The question arises, we have seen, out of an abstraction from
our constant enquiry into the real nature of this or that par-
ticular appearance or event — an enquiry in which we always
seek for an unchanging relation between the appearance and
its conditions, or again for an unchanging relation between
these and certain other conditions. The complete deter-
mination of an event it may be impossible for our intelligence
to arrive at. There may always remain unascertained con-
ditions which may render the relation between an appearance
and such conditions of it as we know, liable to change. But
that there is an unalterable order of relations, if we could
only find it out, is the presupposition of all our enquiry into
the real nature of appearances ; and such unalterableness
implies their inclusion in one system which leaves nothing
outside itself. Are we then entitled to ask — and if so, are
we able to answer — the further question, What is implied in
there being such a single, all-inclusive, system of relations ?
or, What is the condition of its possibility ? If this question
can be answered, the condition ascertained will be the
condition of there being a nature and of anything being
real, in the only intelligible sense that we can attach to the
words ' nature ' and ' real.' It would no doubt still be open
to the sceptic, should this result be attained, to suggest that
32 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bK. I
the validity of our conclusion, upon our own showing,
depends upon there really being such an order of nature as
our quest of knowledge supposes there to be, which remains
unproven. But as the sceptic, in order to give his language
a meaning, must necessarily make the same supposition — as
he can give no meaning to reality but the one explained —
his suggestion that there really may not be such an order of
nature is one that conveys nothing at all.
27. First, then, is there any meaning in the question
just put ? Having set aside as unmeaning the question,
What is the real ? can we be entitled to ask, What is implied
in there being a nature of things ? If the former question
would have been only answerable on the self-contradictory
supposition of there really being something other than the
real from which it could be distinguished, will not the latter
in like manner be only answerable on the equally impossible
supposition of there being something outside the nature of
things, outside the one all-inclusive system of relations, by
reference to which this nature or system can be explained ?
To this we reply that the question stated is or is not one
that can be fitly asked, according as the conception of
nature, of a single all-inclusive system of relations, is or is
not one that can stand alone, is or is not one that requires
something else to render it intelligible. To suppose that
this ' something else,' if nature were found unthinkable
without it, is related to those conditions, of which the
relation to each other forms the system of nature, in the
same way in which these are related to each other, would
no doubt be in contradiction with our account of this
system as one and all-inclusive. It could not therefore be
held to be related to them as, for instance, an invariable
antecedent to an invariable sequent, or as one body to
another outside it. But there would be no contradiction
in admitting a principle which renders all relations possible,
and is itself determined by none of them, if, on considera-
tion of what is needed to constitute a system of relations,
we found such a principle to be requisite.
CH.l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 33
28. This, then, is the consideration which we have now
to undertake. Relation is to us such a familiar fact that
we are apt to forget that it involves all the mystery, if it be
a mystery, of the existence of many in one. Whether we
say that a related thing is one in itself, manifold in respect
of its relations, or that there is one relation between mani-
fold things, e.g., the relation of mutual attraction between
bodies — and one expression or the other we must employ
in stating the simplest facts — we are equally affirming the
unity of the manifold. Abstract the many relations from
the one thing, and there is nothing. They, being many,
determine or constitute its' definite unity. It is not the case
that it iirst exists in its unity, and then is brought into various
relations. Without the relations it would not exist at all. In
like manner the one relation is a unity of the many things.
They, in their manifold being, make the one relation. If
these relations really exist, there is a real unity of the mani-
fold, a real multiplicity of that which is one. But a plurality
of things cannot of themselves unite in one relation, nor can
a single thing of itself bring itself into a multitude of relations.
It is true, as we have said, that the single things are nothing
except as determined by relations which are the negation of
their singleness, but they do not therefore cease to be single
things. Their common being is not something into which
their several existences disappear. On the contrary, if they
did not survive in their singleness, there could be no
relation between them — nothing but a blank featureless
identity. There must, then, be something other than the
manifold things themselves, which combines them without
effacing their severalty.
29. With such a combining agency we are familiar as our
intelligence. It is through it that the sensation of the present
moment takes a character from comparison with the sensation
of a moment ago, and that the occurrence, consisting in the
transition from one to the other, is presented to us. It is
essential to the comparison and to the character which the
sensations acquire from the comparison, essential, too, to
D
34 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
their forming an observable event or succession, that one
should not be fused with the other, that the distinct being
of each should be maintained. On the other hand, in the
relation to which their distinctness is thus necessary they are
at the same time united. But if it were not for the action of
something which is not either of them or both together, there
would be no alternative between their separateness and their
fusion. One might give place to the other, or both together
might be combined into a third ; but a unity in which their
distinctness is preserved could not be constituted without
the relating act of an intelligence which does not blend
with either.
The above is an instance of relation between sensations
which, as brought into relation by intelligence, become sen-
sible objects or events. But the same or an analogous action
is necessary to account for any relation whatever — for a
relation between material atoms as much as any other.
Either then we must deny the reality of relations altogether
and treat them as fictions of our combining intelligence j
or we must hold that, being the product of our combining
intelligence, they are yet ' empirically real ' on the ground
that our intelligence is a factor in the real of experience ; or
if we suppose them to be real otherwise than merely as for
us, otherwise than in the 'cosmos of our experience,' we must
recognise as the condition of this reality the action of some
unifying principle analogous to that of our understanding.
30. As we have seen, the first of these alternative views, if
consistently carried out, will not allow us to regard anything
as real of which anything can be said, since all predication is
founded on relation of some kind. It therefore naturally
leads to the second. All that we in fact count real turns out
to be determined by relations. Feeling may be the revela-
tion or the test of the real, but it must be feeling in certain
relations, or it neither reveals nor tests anything. Thus we
are obliged to recognise a reality, at least of that kind which
in our every-day knowledge and action we distinguish from
illusion, in what is yet the work of the mind, or at any rate
CH.l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 35
must be held to be so until relations can be accounted for
without a relating act or that act referred to something else
than the mind. Hence with those who adhere to the oppo-
sition between the real and the work of the mind, and who
at the same time cannot ignore the work of the mind in the
constitution of relations, there arises a distinction between
reality in some absolute sense — the reality of 'things-in-them-
selves,' which are supposed to be wholly exempt from any
qualification through relating acts of the mind, but of which,
for that reason, nothing can be known or said — and the 'em-
pirical ' reality of that which we distinguish from illusion, as
standing in definite relations to the universe of our experience.
31. This distinction governs the theory of Kant. It is
more easy to point out the embarrassments and inconsis-
tencies into which it leads him, than to get rid of the dis-
tinction itself. Ordinary criticism of Kant, indeed, has not
taken much heed of the distinction or of its perplexing
results. It has been too busy in refuting his doctrine that
' laws of nature ' are derived from understanding, to enquire
closely into his view of the relation between nature, in his
sense of the term, and 'things-in-themselves.' It has been
gaining apparent triumphs, due to a misunderstanding of the
question at issue, over the strongest part of his system, while
it has left the weakest unassailed. There have been abun-
dant proofs of what was not in dispute, that our knowledge
of laws of nature is the result of experience ; but the question
whether phenomena could be so related as to constitute the
nature which is the object of our experience without the
unifying action of understanding is seldom even touched.
Given an experience of phenomena related to each other in
one system — so related that, whatever an object is really, or
according to the fulness of its relations, it is unalterably — it
is easy to show that our knowledge of laws of nature is
derived from it. Such experience in its most elementary
form is already implicitly a knowledge that there are laws of
nature, and only needs to be reflected on in order to become
so explicitly. When it has become so explicitly, the develop -
o 3
36 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
ment of the experience — through cognisance of relations of
which there has previously been no experience, or of which
the experience has not been reflected on— becomes a grow-
ing knowledge of what the laws of nature in particular are.
But the derivation of knowledge from an experience of
unalterably related phenomena is its derivation from objects
unalterably related in consciousness. If the relation of the
objects were not a relation of them in consciousness, there
would be no experience of it. The question then arises how
a succession of feelings becomes such a relation of objects in
consciousness. If a relation of objects existed or could be
known to exist otherwise than for consciousness, this would
not help to account for what has to be accounted for, which
is wholly a process of consciousness. The feelings which
succeed each other are no doubt due to certain related con-
ditions, which are not feelings. But granting forthe moment
that these conditions and their relation exist independently of
consciousness, in accounting for a multitude of feelings they
do not account for the experience of related objects. Of two
objects which form the terms of a relation one cannot exist
as so related without the other, and therefore cannot exist
before or after the other. For this reason the objects between
which a relation subsists, even a relation of succession, are,
just so far as related, not successive. In other words, a
succession always implies something else than the terms
of the succession, and that a 'something else' which can
simultaneously present to itself objects as existing not simul-
taneously but one before the other.
32. Thus, in order that successive feelings may be related
objects of experience, even objects related in the way of
succession, there must be in consciousness an agent which
distinguishes itself from the feelings, uniting them in their
severalty, making them equally present in their succession.
And so far from this agent being reducible to, or derivable
from, a succession of feelings, it is the condition of there
being such a succession ; the condition of the existence of
that relation between feelings, as also of those other relations
CH.l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 37
which are not indeed relations between feelings, but which,
if they are matter of experience, must have their being in
consciousness. If there is such a thing as a connected
experience of related objects, there must be operative in
consciousness a unifying principle, which not only presents
related objects to itself, but at once renders them objects
and unites them in relation to each other by this act of
presentation ; and which is single throughout the experience.
The unity of this principle must be correlative to the unity
of the experience. If all possible experience of related
objects — the experience of a thousand years ago and the
experience of to-day, the experience which I have here and
that which I might have in any other region of space — forms
a single system ; if there can be no such thing as an experi-
ence of unrelated objects ; then there must be a correspond-
ing singleness in that principle of consciousness which forms
the bond of relation between the objects.
33. It is such a principle that Kant speaks of sometimes
as the ' synthetic unity of apperception,' sometimes simply
as ' understanding.' For the reasons stated there seems no
way of escape from the admission that it is, as he says, ' the
basis of the necessary regularity of all phenomena in an
experience ' : ' the basis, that is to say, not merely of our
knowledge of uniform relations between phenomena, but of
there being those uniform relations. The source of the
relations, and the source of our knowledge of them, is one
and the same. The question, how it is that the order of
nature answers to our conception of it — or, as it is some-
times put, the question, whether nature really has, or,
having, will continue to have, the uniformity which belongs
to it in our conception — is answered by recognition of the
fact that our conception of an order of nature, and the 1
relations which form that order, have a common spiritual^
squrce^__ TSenuniformity'oT nature does not mean that its
constituents are everywhere the same, but that they are
• Kant's Werke, ed. Rosenkranz, II. p. 114; ed. Hartenstein (1867),
III. p. 585-
38 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
everywhere related ; not that ' the thing which has been is
that which shall be,' but that whatever occurs is determined
by relation to all that has occurred, and contributes to
determine all that will occur. If nature means the system
of objects of possible experience, such uniformity neces-
sarily arises in it from the action of the same principle
which is implied in there being any relation between the
objects of experience at all. A relation not related to all
other relations of which there can be experience, is an
impossibility. It cannot exist except as constituted by the
unifying subject of all experienced relations, and this con-
dition of its possibility implies its connexion with all other
relations that are, or come to be, so constituted. Every
real relation, therefore, that is also knowable, is a necessary
or ' objective ' or unalterable relation. It is a fact of which
the existence is due to the action of that single subject of
experience which is equally, and in the same way, the
condition of all facts that can be experienced ; a fact which
thus, through that subject, stands in definite and unchange-
able connexion with the universe of those facts, at once
determining and determined by them.
34. The result of this view is to overcome the separation,
which in our ordinary thinking we assume, between the
faculty or capacity or subjective process of experience on the
one side and the facts experienced on the other. In first
reflecting on our knowledge of a world, we always regard the
facts known as existing quite independently of the activity
by means of which they are known. Since it is obvious that
the facts of the world do not come into existence when this
or that person becomes acquainted with them, so long as we
conceive of no intellectual action but that which this or that
person exercises, we necessarily regard the existence or occur-
rence of the facts as independent of intellectual action.
Hence arises the antithesis between the known or knowable
world and the subject capable of knowing it, as between two
existences independent of each other, or of which the former
is at any rate independent of the latter. The mind is
CH. l] THE SPIRITUALPRINCIPLE IN NATURE 39
supposed to derive its materials from, and to act only in
response to, the action of the world upon it ; but the rela-
tions which it establishes between the materials, so derived,
in its processes of distinction and comparison, of conception,
judgment, and discourse, are supposed to be quite different,
and to have a diiferent source, from the relations between
things or matters of fact in the world known. Upon further
reflection, however, the untenableness of this view becomes
apparent. It renders knowledge, as of fact or reality, inex-
plicable. It leaves us without an answer to the question,
how the order of relations, which the mind sets up, comes to
reproduce those relations of the material world which are
assumed to be of a wholly different origin and nature. Nor,
as we pursue the analysis of the operations involved in the
simplest perception of fact, are we able to detect any residuary
phenomenon amounting to a fact at all, that can be held to be
given independently of a combining and relating activity,
which, if the antithesis between the work of the mind and
the work of things be accepted, must be ascribed to the
former.
35. The necessity, therefore, of getting rid of the antithesis
in question forces itself upon us : and it is natural that the
way of doing so, which at first sight most commends itself to
us, should consist in treating the mind and its work as a
secondary result of what had previously been opposed to it
as operations of nature. The weakness of such a method is
twofold. In the first place there is the objection upon which
we have already dwelt and which may be put summarily thus :
that ' nature ' is a process of change, and that the derivation
of a consciousness of change from such a process is impossible.
Secondly, such an explanation of the work of the mind, if
nothing is known of it otherwise, is an explanation of it by
the inexplicable. It is taking nature for granted, and at the
same time treating that as a result of nature which is neces-
sary to explain the possibility of there being such a thing as
nature. For nature, as a process of continuous change,
implies something which is other than the changes and to
40 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
which they aire relative. As a system of related elements it
implies a unity, through relation to which the elements are
related to each other. But with the reduction of thought or
spirit or self-consciousness to a result of nature, if such
reduction were possible, we should be eliminating the only
agent that we know as maintaining an identity with itself
throughout a series of changes, or as a principle that can
unite a manifold without cancelling its multiplicity. In so
explaining spirit we should be rendering the basis of our
explanation itself inexplicable.
36. From the Kantian point of view, the dualism of nature
and knowledge is disposed of in a different way. They are
not identified but treated as forming an indivisible whole,
which results from the activity of a single principle. It is
not that first there is nature, and that then there comes to
be an experience and knowledge of it. Intelligence, experi-
ence, knowledge, are no more a result of nature than nature
of them. If it is true that there would be no intelligence
without nature, it is equally true that there would be no
nature without intelligence. Nature is the system of related
appearances, and related appearances are impossible apart
from the action of an intelligence. They are not indeed the
same as intelligence ; it is not reducible to them nor they to
it, any more than one of us is reducible to the series of his
actions or that series to him ; but without it they would not
be, nor except in the activity which constitutes them has it
any real existence. Does this then imply the absurdity that
nature comes into existence in the process by which this
person or that begins to think ? Not at all, unless it is neces-
sary to suppose that intelligence first comes into existence
when this person or that begins to understand — a supposi-
tion not only not necessary, but which, on examination, will
be found to involve impossibilities analogous to those which
prevent us from supposing that nature so comes into existence.
The difference between what may be called broadly the
Kantian view and the ordinary view is this, that whereas,
according to the latter, it is a world in which thought is no
CH. l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 41
necessary factor that is prior to, and independent of, the
process by which this or that individual becomes acquainted
with it, according to the former it is a world already deter-
mined by thought, and existing only in relation to thought,
that is thus prior to, and conditions, our individual acquain-
tance with it. The growth of knowledge on our part is re-
garded not as a process in which facts or objects, in them-
selves unrelated to thought, by some inexplicable means
gradually produce intelligible counterparts of themselves in
thought. The true account of it is held to be that the
concrete whole, which may be described indifferently as an
eternal intelligence realised in the related facts' of the world,
or as a system of related facts rendered possible by such an
intelligence, partially and gradually reproduces itself in us,
communicating piece-meal, but in inseparable correlation,
understanding and the facts understood, experience and the
experienced world.
37. There are difficulties enough, no doubt, in the way
of accepting such a form of ' idealism,' but they need not
be aggravated by misunderstanding. It is simply misunder-
stood if it is taken to imply either the reduction of facts to
feelings— impressions and ideas, in Hume's terminology —
or the obliteration of the distinction between illusion and
reality. The reduction of facts to relations is the very
reverse of their reduction to feelings. No feeling, as such
or as felt, is a relation. We can only suppose it to.be so
through confusion between it and its conditions, or between
it and that fact of its occurrence which is no doubt related
to other facts, but, as so related, is not felt. Even a relation
between feelings is not itself a feehng or felt. A feeling can
only be felt as successive to another feeling, but the terms
of a relation, as we have seen, even though the relation be
one of succession, do not succeed one another. In order
to constitute the relation they must be present together ; so
that, to constitute a relation between feelings, there must be
something other than the feelings for which they are equally
present. The relation between the feelings is not felt, because
42 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
it is only for something that distinguishes itself from the
feelings that it can subsist. It is our cognisance of the
successiveness or transitoriness of feelings that makes us
object intuitively to any idealism which is understood to
imply an identification of the realities of the world with the
feelings of men. Facts, we are sure, are in some way per-
manent. They are not 'like the bubble on the fountain,'
a moment here, then ' gone, and for ever.' But if they were
feelings as we feel them, they would be so. They would
not be ' stubborn things ; ' for as each was felt it would be
done with. They would not form a world to which we have
to adapt ourselves ; for in order to make a world they must
coexist, which feelings, as we feel them, do not.
But the idealism which interprets facts as relations, and can
only understand relations as constituted by a single spiritual
principle, is chargeable with no such outrage on common-
sense. On the contrary, its very basis is the consciousness
of objectivity. Its whole aim is to articulate coherently the
conviction of there being a world of abiding realities other
than, and determining, the endless flow of our feelings. The
source of its differences from ordinary realism lies in its being
less easily satisfied in its analysis of what the existence of
such a world implies. The mere statement that facts are not
feelings, that things are not ideas, that we can neither feel
nor think except contingently upon certain functions of
matter and motion being fulfilled, does not help us to under-
stand what facts and things, what matter and motion, are.
It does not enable us, when we seek to understand these
expressions, to give them any meaning except such as is de-
rived from experience, and, if from experience, then from
relations that have their being only for an intelligent con-
sciousness.
38. So far we have been following the lead of Kant in
enquiring what is necessary to constitute, what is implied
in there being, a world of experience — an objective world,
if by that is meant a world of ascertainable laws, as distin-
CH. 0 THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 43
guished from a world of unknowable ' things-in-themselves.'
We have followed him also, as we believe every one must
who has once faced the question, in maintaining that a
single active self-conscious principle, by whatever name it
be called, is necessary to constitute such a world, as the
condition under which alone phenomena, i.e. appearances
to consciousness, can be related to each other in A single
universe. This is the irrefragable truth involved in the pro-
position that 'the understanding makes nature.' But so
soon as we have been brought to the acceptance of that
proposition, Kant's leading fails us. We might be forward,
from the work thus assigned to understanding in the con-
stitution of nature, to infer something as to the spirituality
of the real world. But from any such irjference Kant would
at once withhold us. He would not only remind us that
the work assigned to understanding is a work merely among
and upon phenomena ; that the nature which it constitutes
is merely a unity in the relations of phenomena ; and that
any conclusion we arrive at in regard to ' nature ' in this
sense has no application to ' things in themselves.' He in-
sists, further, on a distinction between the form and matter
of 'nature' itself, and, having assigned to its 'form' an
origin in understanding, ascribes the 'matter' to an un-
known but alien source, in a way which seems to cancel
the significance of his own declarations in regard to the
intellectual principle necessary to constitute its form. We
do not essentially misrepresent him in saying that by the
' form ' of nature or, as he sometimes phrases it, ' natura
formaliter spectata,' he means the relations by which pheno-
mena are connected in the one world of experience ; by its
'matter,' or 'natura materialiter spectata,' the mere phe-
nomena or sensations undetermined by those relations'.
' Natura formaliter spectata ' is the work of understanding ;
but ' natura materialiter spectata ' is the work of unknown
things-in-themselves, acting in unknown ways upon us.
' Kant's Werke, ed. Rosenkranz, II. p. 755 ; ed. Hartenstein (1867),
III. p. 133.
44 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bK. I
39. Now, if the distinction, thus drawn, between the form
and matter of the world of experience were necessary or
even admissible, the effect of tracing those relations between
phenomena, which form the laws of nature as we know it, to
the action of a spiritual principle, would simply have been
to bring us to a dead-lock. The distinction implies that
phenomena have a real nature as effects of things-in-them-
selves other than that which they have as related to each
other in the universe of our experience : and not only so, it
puts the two natures in a position towards each other of
mere negation and separation, of such a kind that any cor-
respondence between them, any dependence of one upon
the other, is impossible. As effects of things-in-themselves,
phenomena are supposed to have a nature of their own, but
they cannot, according to Kant's doctrine, be supposed to
carry any of that nature with them into experience. All the
nature which they have in experience belongs to them in
virtue of relations to each other which the action of the in-
tellectual principle, expressly opposed to the action of things-
in-themselves, brings about. The nature which a sensation
is supposed to possess ' materialiter spectata,' as the appear-
ance of a thing-in-itself, must not be confused with its nature
as conditioned by a particular mode of matter and motion —
the nature which the man of science investigates. It is pro-
bably from this confusion that Kant's doctrine of the rela-
tion between phenomena and things-in-themselves derives
any plausibility which it may have for most of his readers :
but, after what has been said above, a moment's considera-
tion will show how unwarrantable according to his principles
it is. The nature of a sensation, as dependent upon any
motion or configuration of molecules, is still a nature deter-
mined by its relation to other data of experience — a relation
which (like every other relation within, or capable of coming
within, experience) the single self-distinguishing principle,
which Kant calls understanding, is needed to constitute.
It is not such a nature, but one to which no experience or
interrogation of experience brings us any the nearer, that we
CH. l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 45
must suppose to belong to the phenomenon as an appearance
of a thing-in-itself, if Kant's antithesis is to be maintained.
And if phenomena, as ' materialiter spectata,' have such
another nature, it will follow — not indeed that all our know-
ledge is an illusion in the ordinary sense of the term, for
that implies a possibility of correction by true knowledge —
but that there is no ground for that conviction of there
being some unity and totality in things, from which the
quest for knowledge proceeds. The ' cosmos of our experi-
ence,' and the order of things-in-themselves, will be two
wholly unrelated worlds, of which, however, each determines
the same sensations. All that determination of a sensible
occurrence which can be the object of possible experience
or inferred as an explanation of experience — its simple
position of antecedence or sequence in time to other occur-
rences, as well as its relation to conditions which regulate
that position and determine its sensible nature — will belong
to one world of which a unifying self-consciousness is the
organising principle : while the very same occurrence, as an
effect of things-in-themselves, will belong to another world,
will be subject to a wholly different order of determinations,
which may have — and indeed, in being so described, is
assumed to have — some principle of unity of its own, but
of which, because it is a world of things-in-themselves, the
principle must be taken to be the pure negation of that
which determines the world of experience. If this be so,
the conception of a universe is a delusive one. Man weaves
a web of his own and calls it a universe ; but if the principle
of this universe is neither one with, nor dependent on, that
of things-in-themselves, there is in truth no universe at all,
nor does there seem to be any reason why there should not
be any number of such independent creations. We have
asserted the unity of the world of our experience only to
transfer that world to a larger chaos.
40. A tempting but misleading way out of the difficulty
is to reduce the world of experience to dependence on that
of- things-in-themselves by taking the intellectual principle,
46 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
which, in the sense explained, ' makes ' the world of experi-
ence, to be not, as Kant considered it, an independent
thing-in-itself, but itself a product of things-in-themselves.
Our readiness to confuse things-in-themselves, as just pointed
out, with the material conditions of sensation, may easily
bring us to put the case in this way to ourselves. Certain
combinations of moving matter, we are ready to believe,
issue, by processes yet to be ascertained, in those living
organisms which again, in reaction upon certain modes of
motion, yield sensation ; and the sensitive subject, under a
continuance of like physical influences, somehow grows into
the intellectual subject of which the action is admitted to
be necessary to constitute the ' cosmos of our experience.'
But we have learnt Kant's lesson to very little purpose if
we do not understand that the terms, which in such psycho-
genesis are taken to stand for independent agents, are in
■ fact names for substantiated relations between phenomena ;
relations to which an existence on their own account is
fictitiously ascribed, but which in truth only exist for, or
through the action of, the unifying and self-distinguishing
spiritual subject which they are taken to account for. If
this subject is to be dependent on things-in-themselves,
something else must be understood by these ' things ' than
any objects that we know or can know ; for in the existence
of such objects its action is already implied.
The question then arises whether, when we have excluded
from things-in-themselves every kind of qualification arising
from determination by, or relation to, an intelligent subject,
any meaning is left in the assertion of a dependence of this
subject upon them. Does not any significant assertion of
that dependence, either as a fact or even as a mere possi-
bility, imply a removal of the things-in-themselves from the
region of the purely unknowAle, and their qualification by
an understood relation to the intelligent subject said to be
dependent on them ? But if this is so, and if it is impossible
for such a relation, any more than any other, to exist except
through the unifying action of spirit, what becomes of the
CH.l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 47
independence of the things-in-themselves ? Are they not
being determined by a spiritual action exactly of that kind
which is being alleged to depend on them, and their exclusion
of which is the one point expressed by their designation as
things-in-themselves ?
41. These considerations seem to preclude us, when once
we have recognised the ground of distinction between a world
of experience and a world of things-in-themselves, from any
attempt to overcome that absolute separation between the
two worlds, which Kant's doctrine implies, by treating the
organising subject of the world of experience as in any sense
a product of things-in-themselves. Kant himself lends no
countenance to any such attempt ; but on further reflection
we may begin to question whether the view, which Kant
himself gives, of the relation between things-in-themselves
and the ' matter ' of experience, or ' natura materialiter spe-
ctata ' — the view out of which the whole difficulty arises — is
not itself open to the same charge of inconsistency as that
method of escape from its consequences which we have
examined. When we say that sensations, or phenomena in
respect of their mere 'matter,' are effects of things-in-them-
selves, we may exclude as carefully as possible all confusion
of the things-in-themselves with the ascertainable material
conditions, or formal causes, of feeling, but we cannot assert
such a relation of cause and effect between the things and
sensation without making the former a member of a relation
which, as Kant himself on occasion would be ready to
remind us, we have no warrant for extending beyond the
world of experience, or for considering as independent of
the intellectual principle of unity which is the condition of
there being such a world. Causation has no meaning except
as an unalterable connexion between changes in the world
of our experience — an unalterableness of which the basis is
the relation of that world throughout, with all its changes,
to a single subject. That sensations therefore, the matter
of our experience, should be connected as effects with
things-in-themselves, of which all that can be said is that
48 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE . [,BK. I
they belong to a world other than the world of our experience
and are not relative to the subject to which it is relative, is
a statement self-contradictory or at best unmeaning.
That Kant should not have seen this merely goes to show
that his own doctrine, being the gradual conquest of his
later years, had not obtained full possession of his mind.
The antithesis between the real and the work of thought
had still such command over him that, after he had himself
traced the agency of thought in all that gives the world of
experience a definite character, he still could not help
ascribing to this world, in terms of the knowable, a relation
to an unknowable opposite ; though that very relation, if it
existed, would according to his own showing bring the
unknowable opposite within that world (dependent on an
intelligent subject) from which it is expressly excluded.
42. At this point we may probably anticipate a rejoinder
to some such effect as the foUowihg. It appears to be im-
possible to take the matter of experience to be the effect
of things-in-themselves, since these things, if they are to be
things-in-themselves, cannot be supposed to exist in a rela-
tion which only holds for the world of experience, as deterr
mined by an intelligent subject. But it must be equally
impossible to consider it a product of the intelligent subject,
to which, when we have allowed every function that can be
claimed for it in the way of uniting in a related system the
manifold material of sensation, we must still deny the func-
tion of generating that material. Yet we cannot ignore sen-
sation. We cannot reduce the world of experience to a web
of relations in which nothing is related, as it would be if
everything were erased from it which we cannot refer to the
action of a combining intelligence. After all our protests
against Dualism, then, are we not at last left with an unac-
countable residuum — an essential element of the real world
of experience, which we cannot trace to what we regard as
the organising principle of that world, but which is as neces-
sary to make the world what it is as that principle itself?
What do we gain by excluding other ways of accounting for
CH. l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 49
it, if it is finally irreducible to the only agency by which we
can explain the order of the world? Does it not remain
a thing-in-itself, alien and opposite to anything that we can
explain as the construction of intelligence, just as much as if
it were admitted to be the product of an unknowable power ?
43. The best hope of answering these questions lies in
considering further how they arise. They are due to the
abstraction of the ' matter ' from the ' form ' of experience.
This abstraction we inevitably make in reflecting on the
process by which we obtain such knowledge as we have,
but it deceives us when we make it a ground for supposing
a like separation of elements in the world of experience. It is
true indeed, according to the doctrine previously stated, that
the principle which enables us to know that there is a world,
and to set about learning its nature, is identical with that
which is the condition of there being a world ; but it is not
therefore to be imagined that all the distinctions and relations,
which we present to ourselves — and necessarily present to
ourselves — in the process of learning to know, have counter-
parts in the real world. Our presentation of them, as a part
of our mental history, is a fact definitely related and con-
ditioned in the reality of the world ; but the distinctions
presented may exist only for us, in whom the intellectual
principle realises itself under special conditions, not in the
world as it is in itself or for a perfect intelligence.
The distinction between the form and matter of experience
is a distinction of this kind. In reflecting on the process by
which we have come to know anything, we find that, at any
stage we may recall, it consists in a further qualification of
a given material by the consideration of the material under
relations hitherto unconsidered. Thus as contrasted with,
and abstracted from, the further formation which upon
continued observation and attention it may acquire, any
perception, any piece of knowledge, may be regarded as an
unformed matter. On the other hand, when we look at what
the given perception or piece of knowledge is in itself, we
find that it is already formed, in more complex ways than
£
50 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bK. I
we can disentangle, by the synthesis of less determinate data.
But there is a point at which the individual's retrospective
analysis of the knowledge which he finds himself to possess
necessarily stops. Antecedently to any of the formative
intellectual processes which he can trace, it would seem
that something must have been given for those processes to
begin upon. This something is taken to be feeling, pure and
simple. When all accretions of form, due to the intellectual
establishment of relations, have been stripped off, there
seem to remain the mere sensations without which the in-
tellectual activity would have had nothing to deal with or
operate upon. These then must be in an absolute sense
the matter — the matter excluding all form — of experience.
' 44. Now it is evident that the ground on which we make
this statement, that mere sensations form the matter of
experience, warrants us in making it, if at all, only as a state-
ment in regard to the mental history of the individual.
Even in this reference it can scarcely be accepted. There
is no positive basis for it but the fact that, so far as memory
goes, we always find ourselves manipulating some data of
consciousness, themselves independent of any intellectual
manipulation which we can remember applying to them.
But on the strength of this to assume that there are such
- data in the history of our experience, consisting in mere
sensations, antecedently to any action of the intellect, is not
really an intelligible inference from the fact stated. It is
an abstraction which may be put into words, but to which
no real meaning can be attached. For a sensation can
only form an object of experience in being determined by
an intelligent subject which distinguishes it from itself and
contemplates it in relation to other sensations ; so that to
suppose a primary datum or matter of the individual's
experience, wholly void of intellectual determination, is to
suppose such experience to begin with what could not
belong to or be an object of experience at all.
45. But the question we are here concerned with is not
Tvhether any such thing as mere sensation, a matter wholly
ca. l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 51
unformed by intelligence, exists as a stage in the process by
which the individual becomes acquainted with the world ;
it is the question whether there is any such element in the
world of knowable facts. Has nature — the system of con-
nected phenomena, or facts related to consciousness, which
forms the object of experience — a reality of that kind which
Kant describes as ' natura materialiter spectata ; ' a reality
consisting of mere sensations, or sensations of which the
qualities, whatever they may be, are independent of such
determination as arises from the action of a unifying and
self-distinguishing subject? Or has it in any other sense
a 'matter' which does not depend on a combining intelligence
for being what it is, as much as does the relation between my
experience of to-day and that of my previous life ?
Phenomena are facts related to consciousness. Thus,
when we enquire whether there is such a thing in the world
of phenomena as sensation undetermined by thought, the
question may be considered in relation either to the facts,
as such, or to the consciousness for which the facts exist.
It may be put either thus — Among the facts that form the
object of possible experience, are there sensations which do
not depend on thought for being what they are ? or thus —
Is sensation, as unqualified by thought, an element in the
consciousness which is necessary to there being such a thing
as the world of phenomena ?
46. After what has been already said, the answer to these
questions need not detain us long. If it is admitted that
we know of no other medium but a thinking or self-
distinguishing consciousness, in and through which that
unification of the manifold can take place which is necessary
to constitute relation, it follows that a sensation apart from
thought — not determined or acted on by thought — would
be an unrelated sensation ; and an unrelated sensation
cannot amount to a fact. Mere sensation is in truth a phrase
that represents no reality. It is the result of a process of
abstraction ; but having ^got the phrase we give a confused
meaning to it, we fill up the shell which our abstraction has
E 2
52 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
left, by reintroducing the qualification which we assumed
ourselves to have got rid of. We present the mere sensations
to ourselves as determined by relation in a way that would
be impossible in the absence of that connecting action which
we assume to be absent in designating them mere sensations.
The minimum of qualification which we mentally ascribe to
the sensation in thus speaking of it, is generally such as
implies sequence and degree. A feeling not characterised
either by its connexion with previous feeling or by its own
intensity we must admit to be nothing at all, but at first
sight we take it for granted that the character thus given to
a feeling would belong to it just the same, though there were
no such thing as thought in the world. It certainly does
not depend on ourselves — on any power which we can
suppose it rests with our will to exert or withhold — whether
sensations shall occur to us in this or that order of succession,
with this or that degree of intensity. But the question is
whether the relation of time between one sensation and
another, or that relation between a sensation and other
possible modes of itself which is implied in its having
p. degree, could exist if there were not a subject for which
the several sensations, or modes of the same sensation, were
equally present and equally distinguished from itself. If it
is granted that these relations, which constitute the minimum
determination of a sensible fact, only exist through the action
of such a subject, it follows that thought is the necessary
condition of the existence of sensible facts, and that mere
sensation, in the sense supposed, is not a possible constituent
in the realm of facts.
47. Or, if the consequence be disputed, the dispute can
only turn on a secondary question as to the fitness of the
term ' thought ' to represent a function of which the essential
nature is admitted. If by thought is necessarily understood
a faculty which is born and dies with each man; which
is exhausted by labour and refreshed by repose ; which is
exhibited in the construction of chains of reasoning, but
not in the common ideas which make mankind and its
CH. l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 53
experience one ; on which the ' great thinker ' may plume
himself as the athlete on the strength of his muscles ; then
to say that the agency which makes sensible facts what they
are can only be that of a thinking subject, is an absurd
impropriety. But if it appears that a function in the way
of self-consciousness is implied in the existence of relations,
and therefore of determinate facts — a function identical in
principle with that which enables the individual to look before
and after, and which renders his experience a connected
system — then it is more reasonable to modify some of our
habitual notions of thought as exercised by ourselves than,
on the strength of these notions, to refuse to recognise an
essential identity between the subject which forms the
unifying principle of the experienced world, and that which)
as in us, qualifies us for an experience of it. It becomes time
to consider whether the characteristics of thought, even as
exercised by us, are not rather to be sought in the unity of
its object as presented to all men, and in the continuity
of all experience in regard to that object, than in the
incidents of an individual life which is but for a day, or
in abilities of which any man can boast that he has more
than his neighbour.
48. Our question, then, in the first of the two forms sug-
gested, must be answered in the negative. A fact consisting
of mere feeling, in the sense supposed, is a contradiction, an
impossibility. This does not of course mean that no being
can feel which does not also think. We are not called on
here to enquire whether there are really animals which feel
but have not the capacity of thinking. All that the present
argument would lead us to maintain would be that, so far
as they feel without thinking, their feelings are not facts for
them — for their consciousness. Their feelings are facts;
but they are facts only so far as determined by relations,
which exist only for a thinking consciousness and otherwise
could not exist. And, in like manner, that large part of our
own sensitive life which goes on without being affected by
conceptions, is a series of facts with the determination of
54 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
which, indeed, thought, as ours or in us, has nothing to do,
but which not the less depends for its existence as a series
of facts on the action of the same subject which, in another
mode of its action, enables us to know them. But in saying
this, it may be objected, we have already admitted that
there is such a thing as a merely feeling consciousness ;
and, in the presence of this admission, what becomes of the
denial to feeling of any separate or independent reality?
The answer is that the distinction of the merely feeling
consciousness is just this, that what it is really it is not
consciously — that the relations by which it is really determined
do not exist for it, but for the thinking consciousness on
which it and they alike depend for being what they are.
Its very characteristics as a merely feeling consciousness
depend on conditions, in the universe of things, by which it
would not be conditioned if it were really no more than it
feels itself to be ; if it were not relative to, and had not its
existence for, another form of consciousness which compre-
hends it and its conditions.
49. In the second of the forms in which the question be-
fore us admits of being presented — Can sensation exist as an
independent element in a consciousness to which facts can
appear ? — it has been virtually answered in being answered
in the first. To that thinking subject, whose action is the
universal bond of relation that renders facts what they are,
their existence and their appearance must be one and the
same. Their appearance, their presence to it, is their exis-
tence. Feeling can no more be an independent element in
that subject, as the subject to which they appear, than it can
be an independent element in it, as the subject through
whose action they exist. It is true on the one hand, as has
just, been admitted, that in a great part of our lives we feel
without thinking and without any qualification of our feelings
by our thoughts ; while yet, on the other hand, we are sub-
jects to whom facts can appear, who are capable of con-
ceiving a world of phenomena. But just so far as we feel
without thinking, no world of phenomena exists for us. The
CH. l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 55
suspension of thought in us means also the suspension of
fact or reality for us. We do not cease to be facts, but facts
cease to exist for our consciousness. However then we may
explain the merely temporary and interrupted character of
the action of thought upon feeling in us, that temporary
character affords no reason why we should hesitate to deny
that feeling unqualified by thought can be an element in the
consciousness which is necessary to there being such a thing
as a world of phenomena.
50. Mere feeling, then, as a matter unformed by thought,
has no place in the world of facts, in the cosmos of possible
experience. Any obstacle which it seemed to present to a
monistic view of that world may be allowed to disappear.
We may give up the assumption that it needs to be accounted
for as a product of things-in-themselves ; or that, if not
accounted for in this way, it still remains an unaccountable
opposite to thought and its work. Feeling and thought are
inseparable and mutually dependent in the consciousness
for which the world of experience exists, inseparable and
mutually dependent in the constitution of the facts which form
the object of that consciousness. Each in its full reality
includes the other. It is one and the same living world of ex-
perience which, considered as the manifold object presented
by a self-distinguishing subject to itself, may be called feeling,
and, considered as the subject presenting such an object to
itself, may be called thought. Neither is the product of the
other. It is only when by a process of abstraction we have
reduced either to something which is not itself, that we can
treat either as the product of anything, or apply the category
of cause and effect to it at all. For that category is itself their
product. Or rather, it represents one form of the activity of
the consciousness which in inseparable union they constitute.
The connexion between a phenomenon and its conditions is
one that only obtains in and for that consciousness. No
such connexion can obtain between that consciousness and
anything elsej which means that the consciousness itself,
whether considered as feeling or considered as thought,
56 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
being that by means of which everything is accounted for,
does not in turn admit of being accounted for, in the sense
that any ' whence ' or ' why ' can be assigned for it.
Any constituent of the world of possible experience we
can account for by exhibiting its relation to other consti-
tuents of the same world ; but this is not to account for the
world itself. We may and do explore the conditions under
which a sentient organism is formed, and the various forms
of molecular action by which particular sensations on the
part of such an organism are elicited. We may ascertain
uniformities in the sequence of one feeling upon another.
In the life of the individual and the race we may trace
regular histories of the manner in which a particular way of
thinking has been affected by an earlier, and has in turn
affected a later way ; of the determination of certain ideas by
certain emotions, and of certain emotions by certain ideas.
But in all this we are connecting phenomena with phenomena
within a world, not connecting the world of phenomena with
anything other than itself. We are doing nothing to account
for the all-uniting consciousness which alone can render these
sequences and connexions possible, for which alone they
exist, and of which the action in us alone enables us to know
them. We can indeed show the contradictions involved in
supposing a world of phenomena to exist otherwise than in
and for consciousness, and upon analysis can discern what
must be the formal characteristic of a consciousness for which
a system of related phenomena exists. So far we can give an
account of what the world as a whole must be, and of what
the spirit that constitutes it does. But just because all that
we can experience is included in this one world, and all our
inferences and explanations relate only to its details, neither
it as a whole, nor the one consciousness which constitutes it,
can be accounted for in the ordinary sense of the word. They
cannot be accounted for by what they include, and being all-
inclusive — at any rate so far as possible experience goes —
there remains nothing else by which they can be accounted
for. And this is equally true of consciousness as feeling and
CH. l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 57
of consciousness as thought, for each in its reality involves
the other.
51. AVe are now in a position to reconsider the restriction
which Kant puts on the interpretation of his own dictum
that 'understanding makes nature.' This with him means
that understanding, as the unifying principle which is the
source of relations, acts formatively upon feelings as upon
a material given to it from an opposite source called 'things-
in-themselves/ rendering them into one system of phenomena
called ' nature,' which is the sole object of experience, and
to which all judgments as to matters of fact relate. We
demur to the independent reality, or reality as determined by
something else than thought, which is thus ascribed to feeling.
It is not that we would claim any larger function for thought
than Kant claims for understanding as separate from feeling,
supposing that separation to be once admitted. It is the
separation itself that is in question. We do not dispute the
validity of Locke's challenge to a man by any amount ot
thinking to produce a single ' simple idea ' to himself. We
admit that mere thought can no more produce the facts of
feeling, than mere feeling can generate thought. But we
deny that there is really such a thing as ' mere feeling ' or
'mere thought.' We hold that these phrases represent
abstractions to which no reality corresponds, either in the
facts of the world or in the consciousness to which those
facts are relative. We can attach no meaning to ' reality,' as
applied to the world of phenomena, but that of existence
under definite and unalterable relations ; and we find that it
is only for a thinking consciousness that such relations can
subsist. Reality of feeling, abstracted from thought, is
abstracted from the condition of its being a reality. That
great part of our sensitive life is not determined by our
thought, that the sensitive life of innumerable beings is
wholly undetermined by any thought of theirs or in them, is
not in dispute : but this proves nothing as to what that sensi-
tive life really is in nature or in the cosmos of possible ex-
perience. It has no place in nature, except as determined by
58 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
relations which can only exist for a thinking consciousness.
For the consciousness which constitutes reality and makes
the world one it exists, not in that separateness which be-
longs to it as an attribute of beings that think only at times
or not at all, but as conditioned by a whole which thought in
turn conditions.
As to what that consciousness in itself or in its complete-
ness is, we can only make negative statements. That there
is such a consciousness is implied in the existence of the
world ; but what it is we only know through its so far acting
in us as to enable us, however partially and interruptedly,
to have knowledge of a world or an intelligent experience.
In such knowledge or experience there is no mere thought
or mere feeling. No feeling enters into it except as quali-
fying, and qualified by, an interrelated order of which a self-
distinguishing subject forms the unifying bond. Thought
has no function in it except as constantly co-ordinating ever
new appearances in virtue of their presence to that one
subject. And we are warranted in holding that, as a mutual
independence of thought and feeling has no place in any
consciousness on our part, which is capable of apprehending
a world or for which a world exists, so it has none in the
world-consciousness of which ours is a limited mode.
•
52. The purpose of this long discussion has been to
arrive at some conclusion in regard to the relation between
man and nature, a conclusion which must be arrived at
before we can be sure that any theory of ethics, in the
distinctive sense of the term, is other than wasted labour.
If by nature we mean the object of possible experience, the
connected order of knowable facts or phenomena — and this
is what our men of science mean by it when they trace the
natural genesis of human character — then nature implies
something other than itself, as the condition of its being
what it is. Of that something else we are entitled to say,
positively, that it is a self-distinguishing consciousness;
because the function which it must fulfil in order to render
CH. l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 59
the relations of phenomena, and with them nature, possible,
is one which, on however limited a scale, we ourselves
exercise in the acquisition of experience, and exercise only
by means of such a consciousness. We are further entitled
to say of it, negatively, that the relations by which, through
its action, phenomena are determined are not relations of it
— not relations by which it is itself determined. They arise
out of its presence to phenomena, or the presence of pheno-
mena to itj but the very condition of their thus arising is that
the unifying consciousness which constitutes them should
not itself be one of the objects so related. The relation of
events to each other as in time implies their equal presence
to a subject which is not in time. There could be no such
thing as time if there were not a self-consciousness which is
not in time. As little could there be a relation of objects
as outside each other, or in space, if they were not equally
related to a subject which they are not outside ; a subject
of which outsideness to anything is not a possible attribute j
which by its synthetic action constitutes that relation, but
is not itself determined by it. The same is true of those
relations which we are apt to treat as independent entities
under the names matter and motion. They are relations
existing for a consciousness which they do not so condition
as that it should itself either move or be material.
53. If objection is taken to the interpretation of matter
as consisting in certain relations, if its character as substance
is insisted on, it remains to ask what is meant by substance.
It is not denied that there are material substances, but their
qualification both as substances and as material will be
found to depend on relations. By a substance we mean
that which is persistent throughout certain appearances. It
represents that identical element throughout the appearances,
that permanent element throughout the times of their appear-
ance, in virtue of which they are not merely so many differ-
ent appearances, but connected changes. A piaterial sub-
stance is that which remains the same with itself in respect
of some of the qualities which we include in our definition
6o METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
of matter — qualities all consisting in some kind of relation —
while in other respects it changes. Its character as a sub-
stance depends on that relation of appearances to each other
in a single order which renders them changes. It is not that
first there is a substance, and that then certain changes of it
ensue. The substance is the implication of the changes, and
has no existence otherwise. Apart from the changes no
substance, any more than apart from effects a cause. If we
choose to say then that matter exists as a substance, we
merely substitute for the designation of it. as consisting in re-
lations, a designation of it as a certain correlatum of a certain
kind of relation. Its existence as a substance depends on the
action of the same self-consciousness upon which the con-
nexion of phenomena by means of that relation depends.
And the subject, of which the action is impUed in the
connexion of phenomena in one system of nature by means
of this correlatum of change, is one that can itself be as
little identified with that correlatum — with any kind of sub-
stance— as with the change to which substance is relative. It
has already been pointed out that a consciousness, to which
events are to appear as changes, cannot itself consist in those
events. Its self-distinction from them all is necessary to its
holding them all together as related to each other in the way
of change. And, for the same reason, that connexion of all
phenomena as changes of one world which is implied in the
unity of intelligent experience, cannot be the work of any-
thing which is the substance qualified by those changes. Its
self-distinction from them, which is the condition of their
appearance to it under this relation of change, is incompati-
ble with its being so qualified. Even if we allow it to be
possible that a subject, which connects certain appearances
as changes, should itself be qualified by — should be the
substance persistent in — certain other changes, it is plainly
impossible that a subject which so connects all the appear-
ances of nature should be related in the way of substance to
any or all of them.
54. We may express the conclusion to which we are thus
CH. l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NAIURE 6l
brought by saying that nature in its reality, or in order to
be what it is, implies a principle which is not natural. By
calling the principle not natural we mean that it is neither
included among the phenomena which through its presence
to them form a nature, nor consists in their series, nor is
itself determined by any of the relations which it constitutes
among them. In saying more than this of it we must be
careful not to fall into confusion. We are most safe in
calling it spiritual, because, for reasons given, we are war-
ranted in thinking of it as a self-distinguishing consciousness.
In calling it supernatural we run the risk of misleading and
being misled, for we suggest a relation between it and nature
of a kind which has really no place except within nature, as
a relation of phenomenon to phenomenon. We convey the
notion that it is above or beyond or before nature, that it is
a cause of which nature is the effect, a substance of which
the changing modes constitute nature ; while in truth all the
relations so expressed are relations which, indeed, but for
the non-natural self-conscious subject would not exist, but
which are not predicable of it. If we employ language about
it in which, strictly taken, they are implied, it must only be
on a clear understanding of its metaphorical character.
On the other hand, there is no imperative reason why we
should limit 'nature' to the restricted sense in which we
have been supposing it to be used, if only the same sense
can be covered by another term. If we like, we may employ
the term 'nature' to represent the one whole which includes
both the system of related phenomena and the principle,
other than itself, which that system implies. But in that
case, if we would avoid confusion, we must find some other
term than nature to represent the system of phenomena as
such, or as considered without inclusion of the spiritual
principle which it implies, and some other term than 'natural'
to represent that which this system contains. We are pretty
sure, however, to fail in this, and ' nature ' in consequence
becomes a term that is played fast and loose with in philo-
sophical writing. It is spoken of as an independent agent ;
62 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE
a certain completeness and self-containedness are ascribed
to it; and to this there is no objection so long as we under-
stand it to include the spiritual principle, neither in time nor
in space, immaterial and immovable, eternally one with itself,
which is necessary to the possibility of a world of phenomena.
But it is otherwise if ' nature ' is at the same time thought
of, as it almost inevitably is, under attributes only applicable
to the world of phenomena, and thus as excluding the spiri-
tual principle which that world indeed implies, but implies
as other than itself. In that case, to ascribe independence
or self-containedness to it — if for a moment the use of
theological language may be allowed which it is generally
desirable to avoid — is to deify nature while we cancel its
title to deification. It is to speak of nature without God in
a manner only appropriate to nature as it is in God. Or —
to employ language less liable to misleading associations — it
is to involve ourselves in perpetual confusion by seeking for
a completeness in the world of phenomena, the world exist-
ing under conditions of space and time, which, just because
it exists under those conditions, is not to be found there.
The result of the confusion will generally be that, being
unable to discover any perfection or totality or independent
agency among the matters of fact which we know, and having
ignored the implication by those facts of a spiritual principle
other than themselves, we come to assume that no perfect
or self-determined being exists at all, or at any rate in any
relation to us.
CHAPTER II
THE RELATION OF MAN, AS INTELLIGENCE, TO THE SPIRITUAL
PRINCIPLE IN NATURE
55. The conclusion of the preceding chapter has brought
us to the question which lies at the root of ethical enquiry.
In what relation do we ourselves stand to the one self-
distinguishing subject, other than nature, which we find to
be implied in nature ? To a certain extent an answer to this
question has been involved in the considerations which have
led to the conviction of there being such a subject. That if
we were merely phenomena among phenomena we could not
have knowledge of a world of phenomena, appears from
analysis of the conditions of an intelligent experience. Our
experience, we have seen, has two characteristics, of which
neither admits of being reduced to or explained by the other.
On the one hand it is an order of events in time, consisting
in modifications of our sensibility. On the other hand it is
a consciousness of those events — a consciousness of them as
a related series, and as determined in their relations to each
other by relation to something else, which is from the first
conceived as other than the modifications of our sensibility,
and which with growing knowledge comes to be conceived
as involving relations between objects that are not events at
all, and between events that preceded or lie beyond the
range of sentient life. But, as has been further pointed out,
a consciousness of related events, as related, cannot consist
in those events. The modifications of our sensibility cannot,
as successive events, rhake up our consciousness of them.
Within the consciousness that they are related in the way of
before and after there is no before and after. There is no
such relation between components of the consciousness as
there is between the events of which it is the consciousness.
They form a process in time. If it were a process in time,
64 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
it would not be a consciousness of them as forming such a
process.
58. Thus that man is not merely a phenomenon or
succession of phenomena, that he does not consist in
a series of natural events, is implied in the fact that pheno-
mena appear to him as they do, that for him or for his
consciousness there is such a thing as nature. There are
certain current phrases of modern psychology, which no
doubt have their warrant in facts to be considered presently,
but which, as commonly used, are apt to blind us to this
essential characteristic of the position in which we stand
towards the world we know. We use the term ' phenomena
of consciousness ' as if it covered the whole range of know-
ledge and morality — all our thought about the world, all our
perceptions and conceptions of objects, all the ideas which
we seek to realise in action. We speak of consciousness
universally, without qualification 9r distinction, as a suc-
cession of states ; and the figure of the stream is the accepted
one for expressing the nature of our spiritual life. Now it
would be idle to deny that there is an appropriateness in
a way of speaking which none of us can avoid, but it is
important to call attention to that kind of activity undoubt-
edly exercised by us, implied in all distinctively intelligent or
moral experience, to which it is wholly inappropriate.
If we reflect on what is contained in our knowledge, or
in any conception or perception contributory to it, we shall
see that the relation in which its constituents stand to each
other is essentially different from the relation between stages
of the process by which the knowledge or perception is
arrived at. The figure of the stream may be applicable to
the latter, though the more we think of it the less we shall
find it so, but it is quite inapplicable to the former. Suc-
cessive states of consciousness may be represented as waves
of which one is for ever taking the place of the other, but
such successive states cannot make a knowledge even of the
most elementary sort. Knowledge is of related facts, and
it is essential to every act of knowledge that the related
CH.ll] MAN AND THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE 65
facts should be present together in consciousness. Between
the apprehensions of those facts, so far as they make up
a certain piece of knowledge, there is no succession. I may
have apprehended some of them, no doubt, before I appre-
hend the rest ; or, after having apprehended the latter, my
consciousness may lose its hold on some apprehended before.
In this sense different states of knowledge succeed each
other in the individual, but not so the manifold constituents
of that which in any act of knowledge is present to his mind
as the object known ; not so the determinations of conscious-
ness in which those constituents are presented, and which
make up the complex act of knowledge. For a known object,
as known, is a related whole, of which, as of evesy such whole,
the members are necessarily present together ; and the acts
of consciousness in which the several members are appre-
hended, as forming a knowledge, are a many in one. None
is before or after another. This is equally the case whether
the knowledge is of successive events or of the ' uniformities '
which are said to constitute a law of nature. For, as we have
previously had occasion to point out, between the constituents
of a knowledge of succession there can be no succession : so
long as certain events are contemplated as successive, no one
of them is an object to consciousness before or after another.
57. For this reason no knowledge, nor any mental act
involved in knowledge, can properly be called a 'pheno-
menon of consciousness.' It may be of phenomena ; if the
knowledge is of events, it is so. The attainment of the
knowledge, again, as an occurrence in the individual's
history, a transition from one state of consciousness to
another, may properly be called a phenomenon ; but not so
the consciousness itself of relations or related facts — not so
the relations and related facts present to consciousness— in
which the knowledge consists. For a phenomenon is a sen-
sible event, related in the way of antecedence and conse-
quence to other sensible events; but the consciousness
which constitutes a knowledge, or (if we may be allowed
the use of a word which, though unfamiliar in this connexion,
F
66 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
avoids some ambiguity) the content of such consciousness,
is not an event so related nor made up of Such events. We
cannot point to any other events, as we can in the case of
a phenomenon proper, from antecedence or consequence to
which it takes its character as an event.
As an instance, let us take a man's knowledge of a propo-
sition in Euclid. This means a relation in his consciousness
between certain parts of a figure, determined by the relation
of those parts to other parts. The knowledge is made up of
those relations as in consciousness. Now it is obvious that
there is no lapse of time, however minute, no antecedence or
consequence, between the constituent relations of the con-
sciousness S9. composed, or between the complex formed by
them and anything else. To call such knowing conscious-
ness a phenomenon, in the ordinary meaning of a sensible
event, is a confusion between it and the process of arriving
at or losing it. That in the learning or fftrgetting a proposi-
tion of Euclid, as in the acquisition or loss of any other piece
of knowledge, a series of events takes place, is plain enough j
and such events may legitimately be called ' phenomena of
consciousness.' But it must be noticed that when these
events of the mental history come to be reviewed in intelli-
gent memory or experience — when we know them as the
connected facts of a history — their existence as in conscious-
ness is no longer that of events. They do not succeed each
other in time, but are present in the unity of relation, as much
as are the parts of a geometrical figure which has been appre-
hended by, or taken into, an intelligent consciousness.
58. The discrepancy here pointed out, between the reality
of consciousness as exhibited in knowledge and anything
that can properly be called phenomena or successive states
of consciousness, would be more generally acknowledged but
for two reasons. One of these is the ambiguity attending all
our terms expressive of mental activity — knowledge, con-
ception, perception, &c. — which may denote events in our
mental history, the passing into certain states of conscious-
ness, as well as that of which in those states we are conscious,
CH.n] MAN AND THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE 67
the content and object of consciousness. At the same time —
and this is the second of the reasons referred to — this con-
tent or object is looked upon as existing quite otherwise than
in or for consciousness ; as independent of it, though from
time to time affecting it in a certain way and producing a
certain state of consciousness. Hence it is only the succes-
sive changes in our apprehensive attitude towards the objects
of our knowledge and experience that are commonly put to
the account of consciousness. Its nature is not taken to be
exhibited in the structure of those objects, any more than it
would be if, instead of being objects known and experienced,
they were ' things-in-themselves.' By perception is under-
stood a modification of our sensibility in which some present
external object is revealed to us. Conception we regard
equally as an occurrence in consciousness ; and, though we
suppose it to take place in the absence of any object at the
time affecting the senses, we practically separate in our
thoughts the conceived content or object from the con-
ception, and imagine it vaguely as residing elsewhere than in
consciousness. We thus avoid the necessity of facing the
question how an object determined by relations can have its
being in a consciousness which consists of a series of occur-
rences. Even ' knowledge,' though we often mean by it a
system of known facts or laws, is apt to lose this sense when
we speak of it as a form of consciousness. It then becomes
merely the mental event of arriving at an apprehension of
related facts. It does not represent the relation of the facts
in consciousness. That there must be such a relation of them
in consciousness, and that a consciousness consisting of
events cannot contain such a relation, is a conclusion which
we avoid by eviscerating knowledge of its content, and trans-
ferring this content from consciousness to ' external things.'
59. Even those who recognize the difficulty of extruding
the object conceived or known, an object constituted by
relations, from the consciousness which conceives or knows,
and in consequence of describing conception and knowledge
as mental events or phenomena, will be apt to ignore the
F 3
68 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
same diflSculty in regard to Perception. The externality of
the perceived object to consciousness seems to be taken for
granted, even by those who would be quite ready to tell us
that the ' things ' which we talk of conceiving are but ' nomi-
nal essences.' This arises from the connexion of percep-
tion with sensation, and from the real explicability of sen-
sation by external impact. It is admitted on all hands that
there can be no perception without (in Locke's phraseology)
'actual present sensation.' The difference between a per-
ception of the moon and any mere conception of it is that,
when it is perceived, although it is only in virtue of some
conception of relations that it is perceived as a qualified ob-
ject, there is necessarily some present sensation which those
relations are conceived as determining. From this neces-
sary presence of sensation in the act of perception, there
easily arises a confusion between the perceived object and
the exciting cause of sensation ; which again leads to an
extrusion of the perceived object from the consciousness in
which perception consists, and to the view of it as an exter-
nal something to which perception is related as an occur-
rence to its cause.
60. A little reflection, however, will show us that the
exciting cause, the stimulant, of the sensation involved in
a perception is never the object perceived in a perception.
It is necessary to a perception of colour that there should
be a sensation, arising out of a stimulus of the optic nerve
by a particular vibration of ether. That vibration, however
— the external exciting cause of the sensation — is not the
object perceived in the perception of the colour. That ob-
ject, indeed, will not be the same for every percipient. It
will vary according to the extent of his knowledge and to the
degree of attention aroused in him in the particular case.
The perception may be no more than consciousness of the
fact that a particular colour is presented to him — a fact to
be aware of which is already to be aware of a certain rudi-
mentary relation — or it may be a consciousness of various
relations by which this fact is determined. And the rela-
OH. II] PERCEPTION 69-
tions thus apprehended in the perception may vary, again,
iirom those by which the colour is connected with accom-
panying appearances in superficial experience, to those less
obvious ones which science has ascertained. It may thus
come to include a knowledge that the sensation of light
arises out of a certain relation between vibrations of ether
and the optic nerve. If the perception is that of a man of
science, observing light or colour for scientific purposes, it
probably does so. Such knowledge is present to his mind in
the perception. But it is a mere confusion to imagine that,
in this or any other form of such a perception, the vibration
of ether enters into the object perceived — into the content
of the perception — in the same sense in which it acts as the
exciting cause of the sensation ; or to suppose- that this ob-
ject or content is external to the percipient consciousness,
as the stimulant matter is to the sentient organism.
The sentient organism to which the vibratory ether may
be considered external is not consciousness, either as exer-
cised in perception or in any other way, any more than the
vibratory ether, as external, is the object perceived. Strictly
speaking, it is not a vibratory ether but the fact consisting
in the relation between this and the optic nerve— this fact
as existing for consciousness — that enters into or determines
the perceived object, as the scientific man perceives it.
This fact, as forming part of the content of the perception,
is wholly within consciousness ; or, to speak more accurately,
the opposition of without and within has no sort of ap-
plication to it. A within implies a without, and we are not
entitled to say that anything is without or outside conscious-
ness ; for externality, being a relation which, like any other
relation, exists only in the medium of consciousness, only
between certain objects as they are for consciousness, cannot
be a relation between consciousness and anything else. An
affection of the sentient organism by matter external to it
is the condition of our experiencing the sort of conscious-
ness called perception; a relation of externality between ob-
jects is often part of that which is perceived ; but in no case
70 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
is there such a relation, any more than a relation of before
and after, between the object perceived and the conscious-
ness of it, or between constituents of that consciousness.
61. If, having got rid of the confusion between the
stimulant of sensation and the perceived object, we examine
the constituents of any perceived object — not as a ' thing-in-
itself,' or as we may vainly try to imagine it to be apart from
our perception, but as it actually is perceived — we shall find
alike that it is only for consciousness that they can exist,
and that the consciousness for which they thus exist cannot
be merely a series of phenomena or a succession of states.
For a justification of this statement we may appeal to the
account given of perception by the accepted representatives
of empirical psychology. ' Our perception of an animal or
a flower,' says Mr. Lewes, ' is the synthesis of all the sensa-
tions we have had of the object in relation to our several
senses ^.' This object itself, he tells us, is a ' group of
sensibles ' ; which corresponds with Mill's account of it as
a combination of ' permanent possibilities of sensation.'
Such language is no doubt susceptible of a double interpre-
tation, and it is only upon one of the two possible interpre-
tations that it justifies the conclusion we shall draw from it.
It is true also that this interpretation is not sanctioned by
the writers mentioned, who seem not to distinguish the two
interpretations, and avail themselves sometimes of the one,
sometimes of the other. It is the only interpretation of the
definition, however, that is really suitable to it as a definition
of perception.
62. What exactly is it that is combined in the synthesis
spoken of? Is it a synthesis of feelings as caused by the
action of external irritants on the nervous system, or is it
a synthesis of known and remembered facts that such
feelings have occurred under certain conditions and rela-
tions ? The two kinds of synthesis are perfectly distinct ;
and, though the former may be presupposed in perception,
it is the latter alone which constitutes it in the distinctive
' Problems of Life and Mind, I. 191.
CH. n] PERCEPTION 71
sense. It is true, no doubt, that an excitement of sensation
by some present irritant may revive, in a fainter degree,
feelings that have been previously associated with this
sensation. But such a revival does not constitute a per-
ception. It cannot result in a synthesis of the feelings as
feelings of an object, or in the apprehension of a sensible
fact, recognized as a symbol of many other related facts of
which there would be experience if certain conditions on
the part of a sentient subject were fulfilled — in other words,
as a symbol of possibilities of sensation. If past feelings
were reinstated merely as feelings, they could not properly
be said to be combined in an object or in consciousness of
an object at all, nor would their reinstatement be in any
sense an inference, such as Mr. Lewes rightly holds to be
involved in all perception ^. They could only be combined,
either in the way of producing and giving place to a further
feeling, as httle a consciousness of fact or object as any of
them, or in the sense that their effects are accumulated in
the nervous organism so as to modify its reactions upon
stimulus. Anything more than this — any combination of
the data of feeling as qualities of an object, or as facts
related to a certain sensation, which the recurrence of that
sensation may recall to us — implies the action of a subject
which thinks of its feelings, which distinguishes them from
itself and can thus present them to itself as facts.
Such action is as necessary to the original presentation of
all that is recalled in perception, as to the incorporation of
what is recalled in the total fact perceived. As we have seen,
no feeling, as such or as merely felt, enters into the perceived
object — not even the present sensation which is admitted to
be a necessary condition of perception. It is not the sensa-
tion, but the fact, presented by the self-distinguishing subject
to itself, that such a sensation is here and now occurring,
occurring under certain relations to other experience — it is
this that is the nucleus on which the recalled experience
gathers, suggesting other possibilities of sensation, not them-
' Problems .of Life and Mind, I. 257.
t
72 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
selves 'actual present sensations,' b^t no less present, as
facts, than the fact that the given sensation is here and now
being felt. The knowledge of such possibilities of sensation
is doubtless in every case founded on actual sensation
experienced in the past, but on this as on an observed fact,
determined by relation to other hke facts through the equal
presence of all to a thinking subject. Except to an intelli-
gence which has thus observed sensations as related facts,
there can be no suggestion, upon the recurrence of one of
them, that others are possible upon certain conditions being
fulfilled.
The revival of the past sensations themselves, with what-
ever intensity, is no such suggestion. It may be that the
excitement of sensation by an external stimulant, which is
the occasion of perception, is always followed by a revival,
with some less intensity, of the sensations known to be
possible as accompaniments of the given sensation ; but
the knowledge of their possibility — the apprehension of the
relation between their several possibilities, as facts, and the
fact of the given sensation occurring — this, the essential
thing in perception, is as different from the revival of the
sensations themselves or their images as is the given sensa-
tion from the presentation of its occurrence as a fact. And
on this difference depends the susceptibility of combination
in a perceived object, of presentation as a many in one,
which belongs to known possibilities of sensation, to known
facts that certain feelings would occur under certain con-
ditions, in distinction from feelings as felt. Manifold feel-
ings may combine, as we have seen, in one result, but in
that one result their multiplicity as feelings is lost. The
constituents of a perceived object, on the contrary, whether
we consider them qualities or related facts, survive in their
multiplicity at the same time that they constitute a single
object. The condition of their doing so is the self-distinction
of the thinking subject from the data of sensation, which it at
once presents to itself in their severalty as facts, and unites
as related facts in virtue of its equal presence to them all.
CH. Il] PERCEPTION 73
63. It thus appears that the common objects of experi-
ence— not those 'things in general' which are sometimes
supposed to be the object of conception, but the particular
things we perceive, this flower, this apple, this dog — in the
only sense in which they are objects to us or are perceived
at all, have their being only for, and result from the action of,
a self-distinguishing consciousness. As perceived, they con-
sist in certain groups of facts, which again consist in possi-
bilities of sensation, known to be related in certain ways to
each ether and to some given fact of sensation. The extent
of the group in the case of each perception, and the particu-
lar mode in which the constituent facts are related, depend
on the experience and training of the percipient, as well as
on the direction of his mind at the time of the perception.
In every case the relations by which the given sensation is
determined in the apprehension of the percipient, are but a
minute part of those by which it is really determined. The
object which the most practised botanist perceives in his
observation of a flower, is by no means adequate to the real
nature of the flower. That real nature, indeed, if our previous
conclusions have been true, must consist in relations of which
consciousness is the medium or sustainer, though not con-
sciousness as it is in the botanist. It is not, however, with
the real nature of the flower, but with its nature as perceived
— a fragment of the real nature — that we are here concerned j
and it is relations of which the percipient consciousness is
the sustainer, which exist only through its action, that make
the object, as in each case the percipient perceives it, what
it is to him. Facts related to those of which the percipient
is aware in the object, but not yet knovvn to him, can only
be held to belong to the perceived object potentially or in
some anticipatory sense ', in so far as upon a certain develop-
ment of intelligence, in a direction which it does not rest
with the will of the individual to follow or no, they will be-
come incorporated with it. But they become so incorpo-
rated with it only through the same continued action of a
' [See, however, § 69.]
74 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
combining self-consciousness upon data of sensation, through
which this object, as the percipient already perceives it, has
come to be there for him.
64. Common sense is apt to repel such statements as
these, because they are taken to imply that we can perceive
what we like; that the things we see are fictions of our
own, not determined by any natural or necessary order.
But in truth it implies nothing of the sort, unless it is
supposed that our whole consciousness is a fiction of our
.own, of which it rests with ourselves to make what we please.
Objects do not cease to be ' objective,' facts do not cease to-
be unalterable, because we find that a consciousness which
we cannot alter or escape from, beyond which we cannot
place ourselves, for which many things indeed are external
to each other but io which nothing Can be external, is the
medium through which they exist for us, or because we can
analyse in some elementary way what it must have done in
order to their thus being there for us. It is not the concep-
tion of fact, but the conception of the consciousness for
\ which facts exist, that is affected by such analysis.
So long as consciousness is thought to have nothing to
do with the constitution of the facts of which we are con-
scious, it is possible to look upon it merely as a succession
of events or phenomena ' of the inner sense.' The question
how these inner events or successive phenomena come to
perform a synthesis of themselves into objects is not raised,
because no such work of synthesis is thought to be required
of consciousness at all. The objects we perceive are sup-
posed to be there for us independently of any action of our
minds; we have but passively to let their appearances
follow each other over the mental mirror. While this view
is retained, the succession of such appearances and of the
mental reactions upon them — reactions gradually modified
through accumulated effects of the appearances — may fairly
be taken to constitute our spiritual being. But it is otherwise
when we have recognised the truth, that a sensation excited
by an external irritant is not a perception of the irritant or
CH. n] PERCEPTION 75
(by itself) of anything at all ; that every object we perceive is
a congeries of related facts, of which the simplest component,
no less than the composite whole, requires in order to its
presentation the action of a principle of consciousness, not
itself subject to conditions of time, upon successive appear-
ances, such action as may hold the appearances together,
without fusion, in an apprehended fact. It then becomes
clear that there is a function of consciousness, as exercised
in the most rudimentary experience, in the simplest per-
ception of sensible things or of the appearances of objects,-
which is incompatible with the definition of consciousness
as any sort of succession of any sort of phenomena. Some-
thing else than a succession of phenomena is seen to be as
necessary in the consciousness that perceives facts, as it is
necessary to the possibility of the world of facts itself.
65. We have dwelt at length on this implication in ordinary
perception of a spiritual action irreducible to phenomena,
because the question whether and how far man is a part of
nature, is apt to be debated exclusively on what is considered
higher ground and, in consequence, without an admitted
issue being raised. The transcendence of^ man is main-
tained on the ground of his exercising powers, which it may
plausibly be disputed whether he exercises at all. The notion
that thought can originate, or that we can freely will, is at
once set down as a transcendental illusion. There is more
hope of result if the controversy is begun lower down, with the
analysis of an act which it is not doubted that we perform.
Now, if the foregoing analysis be correct, the ordinary
perception of sensible things or matters of fact involves the
determination of a sensible process, which is in time, by an
agency that is not in time, — in Kant's language, a combina-
tion of 'empirical and intelligible characters,' — as essentially
as do any of those ' higher ' mental operations, of which the
performance may be disputed. The sensation, of which the
presentation as a fact is the nucleus of every perception, is an
event in time. Its conditions again have all of them a history
in time. It is true, indeed, that the relation between it and
^6 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
its cause, if its cause is understood strictly as the sum of its
conditions, is not one of time. The assemblage of con-
ditions, ' external ' and ' internal,' constitutes the sensation.
There is no sequence in time of the sensation upon the assem-
bled conditions. But the assemblage itself is an event that
has had a determinate history ; and each of the constituent
conditions has come to be what it is through a process in
time. So much for the sensation proper. The presentation
of the sensation, again, as of a fact related to other ex-
perience, is in like manner an event. A moment ago I had
not so presented it : after a brief interval the perception will
have given place to another. Yet the content of the pre-
sentation, the perception of this or that object, depends on
the presence of that which in occurrence is past, as a fact
united in one consciousness with the fact of the sensation
now occurring ; or rather, if the perception is one of what we
call a developed mind, on numberless connected acts of such
uniting consciousness, to which limits can no more be set
than they can to the range of experience, and which yield
the conception of a world revealed in the sensation. The
agent of this neutralization of time can as little, it would
seem, be itself subject to conditions in time as the con-
stituents of the resulting whole, the facts united in conscious-
ness into the nature of the perceived object, are before or
after each other.
ee. We are not, however, fully stating the seemingly para-
doxical character of everyday perception, in merely saying
that it is a determination of events in time by a principle
that is not in time. That is a description equally applicable
to fact and to the perception of fact. For fact always implies
relation determined by other relations in a universe of facts ;
and such relations, again, though they be relations of events
to each other in time, imply, as has been previously pointed
out, something out of time, for which all the terms of the
several relations are equally present, as the principle of the
synthesis which unites them in a single universe. But, in
CH. Il] MAN AND THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE 77
thus explaining the ultimate conditions of the possibility ol
fact, we need not assign the events themselves, and the
determination of them by that which is not an event — the
process of becoming, and the regulation of it as an orderly
process, — to one and the same subject; as if the events
happened to and altered the subject that unites them, or as
if the source of order in becoming itself became. We can-
not indeed suppose any real separation between the deter-
minant and the determined. The order of becoming is only
an order of becoming through the action of that which is
not in becoming ; nor can we think of this order as preceded
by anything that was not an order of becoming. We con-
tradict ourselves, if we say that there was first a chaos and
then came to be an order ; for the ' first ' and ' then ' imply
already an order of time, which is only possible through an
action not in time. As little, on the other hand, can we
suppose that which we only know as a principle of unity in
relation, to exist apart from a manifold through which it is
related. But we may avoid considering this principle, or the
subject of which the presence and action renders possible
the relations of the world of becoming, as itself in becoming,
or as the result of a process of becoming. It seems to be
otherwise with our perceiving consciousness. The very con-
sciousness, which holds together successive events as equally
present, has itself apparently a history in time. It seems to
vary from moment to moment. It apprehends processes of
becoming in a manner which implies that past stages of the
becoming are present to it as known facts ; yet is it not
itself coming to be what it has not been ?
67. It will be found, we believe, that this apparent state
of the case can only be explained by supposing that in the
growth of our experience, in the process of our learning to
know the world, an animal organism, which has its history
in time, gradually becomes the vehicle of an eternally com-
plete consciousness. What we call our mental history is
not a history of this consciousness, which in itself can have
no history, but a history of the process by which the animal
78 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bK. I
organism becomes its vehicle. ' Our consciousness ' may
mean either of two things ; either a function of the animal
organism, which is being made, gradually and with interrup-
tions, a vehicle of the eternal consciousness ; or that eternal
consciousness itself, as making the animal organism its vehicle
and subject to certain limitations in so doing, but retaining
its essential characteristic as independent of time, as the
determinant of becoming, which has not and does not itself
become. The consciousness which varies from moment
to moment, which is in succession, and of which each suc-
cessive state depends on a series of ' external and internal '
events, is consciousness in the former sense. It consists in
what may properly be called phenomena; in successive
modifications of the animal organism, which would not, it
is true, be what they are if they were not media for the
realisation of an eternal consciousness, but which are not
this consciousness. On the other hand, it is this latter
consciousness, as so far realised in or communicated to us
through modification of the animal organism, that constitutes
our knowledge, with the relations, characteristic of know-
ledge, into which time does not enter, which are not in be-
coming but are once for all what they are. It is this again
that enables us, by incorporation of any sensation to which
attention is given into a system of known facts, to extend
that system, and by means of fresh perceptions to arrive at
further knowledge.
68. For convenience sake, we state this doctrine, to beigin
with, in a bald dogmatic way, though well aware how un-
warrantable or unmeaning, until explained and justified, it
is likely to appear. Does it not, the reader may ask, involve
the impossible supposition that there is a double conscious-
ness in man ? No, we reply, not that there is a double con-
sciousness, but that the one indivisible reality of our conscious-
ness cannot be comprehended in a single conception. In
seeking to understand its reality we have to look at it from
two different points of view ; and the different conceptions
that we form of it, as looked at from these different points,
CH. Il] MAN AND THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE 79
do not admit of being united, any more than do our im-
pressions of opposite sides of the same shield ; and as we
apply the same term ' consciousness ' to it, from whichever
point of view we contemplate it, the ambiguity noticed necesr
sarily attends that term.
In any case of an end gradually realising itself through
a certain organism a like difficulty arises. If we would state
the truth about a living and growing body, we can only do
it by the help of two conceptions, which we shall try in vain
to reduce to a third. One will be the conception of the
end, the particular form of life realised in the body — an end
real and present, because operative, throughout the develop-
ment of the body, but which we cannot identify with any
stage of that development. The other will be that of the
particular body, or complex of material conditions, organic
to this end, as on the one hand dependent on an inexhaus-
tible series of other material conditions, on the other pro-
gressively modified by results of the action, the life, to which
it is organic. The particular living being is not less one and
indivisible because we cannot dispense with either of these
conceptions, if we would understand it aright, or because it
is sometimes one, sometimes the other, of them that is pre-
dominant in our usage of the term ' living being.' In like
manner, so far as we can understand at all the reality of con-
sciousness, one and indivisible as it is in each of us, it must
be by conceiving both the end, in the shape of a completed
knowledge that gradually realises itself in the organic process
of sentient life, and that organic process itself with its history
and conditions. We have not two minds, but one mind;
but we can know that one mind in its reality only by taking
account, on the one hand, of the process in time by which
effects of sentient experience are accumulated in the organism,
yielding new modes of reaction upon stimulus and fresh as-
sociations of feeUng with feeling; on the other, of the system
of thought and knowledge which realises or reproduces itself
in the individual through that process, a system into the
inner constitution of which no relations of time enter.
8o METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
69. If we examine the notion of intellectual progress
common to all educated men, we find that it virtually
involves this twofold conception of the mind. We regard
it as a progress towards the attainment of knowledge or true
ideas. But we cannot suppose that those relations of facts
or objects in consciousness, which constitute any piece of
knowledge of which a man becomes master, first come into
being when he attains that knowledge ; that they pass
through the process by which he laboriously learns, or
gradually cease to be as he forgets or becomes confused.
They must exist as part of an eternal universe — and that
a spiritual universe or universe of consciousness — during all
the changes of the individual's attitude towards them,
whether he is asleep or awake, distracted or attentive,
ignorant or informed. It is a common-place indeed to
assert that the order of the universe remains the same,
however our impressions may change in regard to it; but
as the common-place is apt to be understood, the universe
is conceived in abstraction from consciousness, while con-
sciousness is identified simply with the changing impressions,
of which the unchanging order is independent. But the
unchanging order is an order of relations ; and, even if
relations of any kind could be independent of consciousness,
certainly those that form the content of knowledge are not
so. As known they exist only for consciousness ; and, if in
themselves they were external to it, we shall try in vain to
conceive any process by which they could find their way
from without to within it. They are relations of facts, which
require a consciousness alike to present them as facts and
to unite them in relation. We must hold then that there is
a consciousness for which the relations of fact, that form the
object of our gradually attained knowledge, already and
eternally exist ; and that the growing knowledge of the
individual is a progress towards this consciousness.
70. It is a consciousness, further, which is itself operative
in the progress towards its attainment, just as elsewhere the
end realised through a certain process itself determines that
CH. ll] MAN AND THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE 8i
process; as a particular kind of life, for instance, informs
the processes organic to it. Every effort fails to trace
a genesis of knowledge out of anything which is not, in form
and principle, knowledge itself. The most primitive germ
from which knowledge can be developed is already a per-
ception of fact, which implies the action upon successive
sensations of a consciousness which holds them in relation,
and which therefore cannot itself be before or after them,
or exist as a succession at all. ' And every step forward in
real intelligence, whether in the way of addition to what we
call the stock of human knowledge, or of an appropriation
by the individual of some part of that stock, is only explicable
on supposition that successive reports of the senses, succes-
sive efforts of attention, successive processes of observation
and experiment, are determined by the consciousness that
all things form a related whole — a consciousness which is
operative throughout their succession and which at the same
time realises itself through them.
71. A familiar illustration may help to bring home that
view of what is involved in the attainment of knowledge for
which we are here contending. We often talk of reading
the book of nature ; and there is a real analogy between the
process in which we apprehend the import of a sentence,
and that by which we arrive at any piece of knowledge. In
reading .the sentence we see the words successively, we
attend to them successively, we recall their meaning succes-
sively. But throughout that succession there must be. present
continuously the consciousness that the sentence has a mean-
ing as a whole; otherwise the successive vision, attention and
recollection would not end in a comprehension of what the
meaning is. This consciousness operates in them, rendering
them what they are as organic to the intelligent reading of
the sentence. And when the reading is over, the con-
sciousness that the sentence has a meaning has become a
consciousness of what in particular the meaning is, — a
consciousness in which the successive results of the mental
operations involved in the reading are held together, without
G
82 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bK. I
succession, as a connected whole. The reader has then, so
far as that sentence is concerned, made the mind of the
writer his own. The thought which was the writer's when
he composed the sentence, has so determined, has so used
as organs, the successive operations of sense and soul on the
part of the reader, as to reproduce itself in him through
them; and the first stage in this reproduction, the condition
under which alone the processes mentioned contribute to it,
is the conviction on the reader's part that the sentence is a
connected whole, that it has a meaning which may be under-
stood. This conviction, it is true, is not wrought in him by
the thought of the writer expressed in that particular sen-
tence. He has learnt that sentences have a meaning before
applying himself to that particular one. Before any one can
read at all, he must have been accustomed to have the
thought of another reproduced in him through signs of one
kind or another. But the first germ of this reproduction,
the first possibility or receptivity of it, must have consisted
in so much communication of some one else's meaning as is
implied in the apprehension that he has a meaning to convey.
It is through this elementary apprehension that certain func-
tions of one man's soul, the soul of a listener or reader,
become so organic to the thought of another, as that this
thought gradually realises itself anew in the soul of the
listener.
May we not take it to be in a similar way that the system
of related facts, which forms the objective world, reproduces
itself, partially and gradually, in the soul of the individual
who in part knows it ? That this system implies a mind or
consciousness for which it exists, as the condition of the
union in relation of the related facts, is not an arbitrary
guess. We have seen that it is the only answer which we
have any ground for giving to the question, how such a union
of the manifold is possible. On the other side, our knowledge
of any part of the system implies a like union of the manifold
in relation; such a presentation of feelings as facts, and such
a determination of the facts by mutual relation, as is only
CH. Il] MAN AND THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE 83
possible through the action upon feelings of a subject dis-
tinguishing itself from them. This being so, it would seem
that the attainment of the knowledge is only explicable as
a reproduction of itself, in the human soul, by the conscious-
ness for which the cosmos of related facts exists — a repro-
duction of itself, in which it uses the sentient life of the soul
as its organ.
72. Because the reproduction has thus a process in time
for its organ, it is at once progressive and incapable of com-
pletion. It is ' never ending, still beginning,' because of the
constant succession of phenomena in the sentient life, which
the eternal consciousness, acting on that life, has perpetually
to gather anew into the timeless unity of knowledge. There
never can be that actual wholeness of the world for us, which
there must be for the mind that renders the world one. But
though the conditions under which the eternal consciousness
reproduces itself in our knowledge are thus incompatible
with finality in that knowledge, there is that element of
identity between the first stage of intelligent experience —
between the simplest beginning of knowledge— and the
eternal consciousness reproducing itself in it, which consists
in the presentation of a many in one, in the apprehension
of facts as related in a single system, in the conception of
there being an order of things, whatever that order may turn
out to be. Just as the conviction that a speaker or writer
has a meaning is at once the first step in the communication
of his thought to a listener or reader, and the condition
determining all the organic processes of reading and listen-
ing which end in the reproduction of the thought, so the
conception described is at once the primary form in which
that mind to which the world is relative communicates itself
to us, and the influence which renders the processes of
sensuous experience into organs of its communication. It
is only as governed by the forecast of there being a related
whole that these processes can yield a growing, though for
ever incomplete, knowledge of what in detail the whole is.
73. There should by this time be no need of the reminder,
G 2
84 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE
that the evidence of the action of this fore-casting idea, in
the several stages of our learning to know, does not depend
on any account of it which the learner may be able to give.
Whether he is able to give such an account or no, depends
on the development of his powers of reflection ; and the
idea is at work before it is reflected on. The evidence of
its action lies in results inexplicable without it. Nor must
we imagine it, as the doctrine of innate ideas might lead us
to do, antecedent in' time to the processes of learning
through which it realises itself, and which, in so doing, it
makes what they are. This would be the same mistake as
to suppose the life of a living body antecedent in time to
the functions of the living body. It is inconsistent with the
essential notion that the consciousness of a related whole,
so far as it is ours, is an end realising itself in and deter
mining the growth of intelligence. Thus when the question
is raised, whether the conception of the uniformity of nature
precedes or follows upon the inartiiicial or unmethodised
exercise of induction, the answer must be either that it does
both or that it does neither ; or, better, that the question,
being improperly put, does not admit of an answer. The
conception of the uniformity of nature is one form of the
consciousness on which we have been dwelling; and the
processes of experience are related to it as respiration or
the circulation of the blood is related to life. It is the end
to which they are organic ; but, at the same time, it is so
operative in them that without it they would not be what
they are. It is no more derivable from processes of sense,
as these would be without it — from excitements and reactions
of the nervous system — than life is derivable from mechanical
and chemical functions of that which does not live. Under
various expressions, it is the primary form of the intellectual
life in which the eternal consciousness, the spirit for which
the relations of the universe exist, reproduces itself in us.
All particular knowledge of these relations is a filling up of
this form, which the continued action of the eternal con-
sciousness in and upon the sentient life renders possible.
CHAPTER III
THE FREEDOM OF MAN AS INTELLIGENCE
74. Throughout the foregoing discussion of the condi-
tions of knowledge our object, it will be remembered, has
been to arrive at some conclusion in regard to the position
in which man himself stands to the system of related pheno-
mena called nature — in other words, in regard to the freedom
of man ; a conclusion on which the question of the possibility
of Ethics, as other than a branch of physics, depends.
Arguing, first, from the characteristics of his knowledge,
postponing for the present the consideration of his moral
achievement, our conclusion is that, while on the one hand
his consciousness is throughout empirically conditioned, —
in the sense that it would not be what at any time it is but
for a series of events, sensible or related to sensibility, some
of them events in the past history of consciousness, others
of them events affecting the animal system organic to con-
sciousness,—on the other hand his consciousness would not
be what it is, as knowing, or as a subject of intelligent expe-
rience, but for the self-realisation or reproduction in it,
through processes thus empirically conditioned, of an eternal
consciousness, not existing in time but the condition of
there being an order in time, not an object of experience
but the condition of there being an intelligent experience,
and in this sense not ' empirical ' but ' intelligible.' In virtue
of his character as knowing, therefore, we are entitled to say
that man is, according to a certain well-defined meaning of
the term, a 'free cause.' Let us reconsider shortly what
that meaningTsI "
75. By the relation of effect to cause, unless the 'cause'
is qualified by some such distinguishing adjective as that
just employed, we understand the relation of a given event,
either to another event invariably antecedent to it and upon
86 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
which it is invariably sequent, or to an assemblage of con-
ditions which together constitute the event — into which it
may be analysed. Such a cause is not d. ' free ' cause. The
uniformly antecedent event is in turn dependent on other
events ; any particular sum of conditions is determined by
a larger complex, which we at least cannot exhaust. But
the condition of the possibility of this relation in either
of its forms — the condition of events being connected in
one order of becoming, the condition of facts being united
in a single system of mutual determination — is the action of
a single principle, to which all events and facts are equally
present and relative, but which distinguishes itself from
them all and can thus unite them in their severalty. In
speaking of this principle we can only use the terms we
have got; and these, being all strictly appropriate to the
relations, or objects determined by the relations, which this
principle renders possible but under which it does not itself
subsist, are strictly inappropriate to it.
Such is the term 'cause.' So far indeed as it indicates
the action of something which makes something else what
it is, it might seem applicable to the unifying principle which
makes the world what it is. But we have no sooner so
applied it than we have to qualify our statement by the
reminder, that to the unifying principle the world, which it
renders one, cannot be something else than itself m the
same way as, to ordinary apprehension, a determined fact is
something else than the conditions determining it, or an
event caused something else than the antecedent events
causing it. That the unifying principle should distinguish
itself from the manifold which it unifies, is indeed the
condition of the unification ; but it must not be supposed
that the manifold has a nature of its own apart from the
unifying principle, or this principle another nature of its
own apart from what it does in relation to the manifold
world. Apart from the unifying principle the manifold
world would be nothing at all, and in its self-distinction
from that world the unifying principle takes its character
CH.ni] THE FREEDOM OF MAN AS INTELLIGENCE 87
from it; or, rather, it is in distinguishing itself from the
world that it gives itself its character, which therefore but
■for the world it would not have.
76. It is true indeed of anything related as a cause to
anything else on which it produces effects, that its efficiency
in the production of those effects is an essential part of its
nature, just as susceptibiUty to those effects is an essential
part of the nature of that in which they take place. No
group of conditions would be what they are but for the effect
which it lies in them to produce, no events what they are
but for the other events that arise out of them ; any more
than, conversely, the conditioned phenomenon, or necessarily
sequent event, has a nature independent of its conditions or
antecedents. • Still every particular cause, whether agent or
assemblage of conditions or antecedent event, has a nature,
made for it by other agents, conditions, or antecedent events,
which appears but partially in any particular effect; and
again the patient or conditioned phenomenon or sequent
event, in which that effect appears, has a nature other than
that which it derives from the particular cause. Therefore
in the determined world there is a sense in saying that
a cause is something on which something else depends for
being what it is, which no longer holds when the effect is
the whole determined world itself, and the cause the unify-
ing principle implied in its determinateness. There is
nothing to qualify the determined world as a whole but that
inner determination of all contained in it by mutual relation,
which is due to the action of the unifying principle ; nor
anything to qualify the unifying principle but this very
action, with the self-distinction necessary to it.
When we transfer the term ' cause,' then, from a relation
between one thing and another within the determined
world to the relation between that world and the agent
implied in its existence, we must understand that there is
no separate particularity ifi the agent, on the one side, and
the determined world as a whole, on the other, such as
characterises any agent and patient, any cause and effect,
88 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
within the determined world. The agent must act abso-
lutely from itself in the action through which that world is
— not, as does everything within the world, under determi-
nation by something else. The world has no character but
that given it by this action ; the agent no character but that
which it gives itself in this action.
77. This is what we mean by calling the agent a 'free
cause.' But the question at once arises whether, when we
have thus qualified the term 'cause' by an epithet which
effectually distinguishes it from any cause cognisable within
the world of phenomena, it still has a meaning for us. The
answer is that but for our own exercise of such causality it
would have none. But, in fact, our action in knowledge —
the action by which we connect successive phenomena in
the unity of a related whole — is an action as absolutely from
itself, as little to be accounted for by the phenomena which
through it become an intelligent experience, or by anything
alien to itself, as is that which we have found to be impUed
in the existence of the universal order. This action of our
own 'mind' in knowledge — to say nothing of any other
achievement of the human spirit — becomes to us, when
reflected on, a causa cognoscendi in relation to the action
of a self-originating ' mind ' in the universe j which we then
learn to regard as the causa essendi to the same action,
exercised under whatever limiting conditions, by ourselves.
We find that, quite apart from the sense in which all facts
and events, including those of our natural life, are determined
by that mind without which nature would not be, there
is another sense in which we ourselves are not so much
determined by it as identified by it with itself, or made the
subjects of its self-communication. All things in nature are
determined by it, in the. sense that they are determined by
each other in a manner that would be impossible but for
its equal, self-distinguishing presence to them all. It is
thus that the events of our natural life are determined by it ;
not merely the mechanical and chemical processes presup-
posed by that life, but the life itself, including all that can
CH.m] THE FREEDOM OF MAN AS INTELLIGENCE 89
properly be called the successive phenomena of our mental
history. But to say that it is thus determined, though it is
true of our natural life, is not the full account of it ; for this
life, with its constituent events or phenomena, is organic to
a form of consciousness of which knowledge is the develop-
ment, and which, if for no other reason than that it conceives
time, cannot itself be in time. While the processes organic
to this consciousness are determined by the mind to which
all things are relative, in the sense that they are part of a
universe which it renders possible, this consciousness itself
is a reproduction of that mind, in respect, at least, of its attri-
butes of self-origination and unification of the manifold.
78. It may be asked here, what after all is the conclusion
as to the freedom of man himself to be drawn from these
considerations in regard to knowledge. 'Granted,' it may
be said, 'that the knowledge of nature is irreducible to
a natural process, that it implies the action of a principle
not in time, which you may call, if you please, an eternal
mind ; still you admit that man's attainment of knowledge
is conditional on processes in time and on the fulfilment of
strictly natural functions. These processes and functions
are as essential to man, as much a part of his being, as his
knowledge is. How then can it be said that the being
itself, thus conditioned, is not a part of nature but is free ?
Or, if this statement is made and can be justified, must it
not be left alongside of an exactly contrary statement ? Do
you not after all leave man still " in doubt to deem himself
a God or beast ; " still perplexed with the " partly this, partly
that " conclusion, for which philosophy, if good for anything,
should substitute one more satisfactory, but which, on the
contrary, it seems merely to restate in a more prolix form ? '
79. We answer that, if the foregoing considerations have
any truth in them, we are not shut up in this ambiguity.
To say that man in himself is in part an animal or product
of nature, on the ground that the consciousness which
distinguishes him is realised through natural processes, is
not more true than to say that an animal is in part a machine,
90 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
because the life which distinguishes it has mechanical
structures for its organs. If that activity of knowledge on
the part of man, to which functions provisionally called
natural are organic, is as absolutely different from any process
of change or becoming as we have endeavoured to show
that it is, then even the functions organic to it are not
described with full truth when they are said to be natural.
For the constituent elements of an organism can only be
truly and adequately conceived as rendered what they are
by the end realised through the organism. The mechanical
structure organic to life is not adequately conceived as a
machine, though, for the purpose of more accurate examina-
tion of the structure in detail, it may be convenient to treat
it as such. And, for a like reason, the state of the case in
regard to a man is not fairly represented by saying that,
though not merely an animal or natural, he is so in respect
of the processes of physical change through which an
intelligent consciousness is realised in him. In strict truth
the man who knows, so far from being an animal altogether,
is not an animal at all or even in part. The functions,
which would be those of a natural or animal life if they were
not organic to the end consisting in knowledge, just because
they are so organic, are not in their full reality natural
functions, though the purposes of detailed investigation of
them^perhaps the purpose of improving man's estate —
may be best served by so treating them. For one who
could comprehend the whole state of the case, even a
digestion that served to nourish a brain, which was in turn
organic to knowledge, would be essentially different from
digestion in an animal incapable of knowledge, even if it
were not the case that the digestive, process is itself affected
by the end to which it is mediately relative. And, if this is
true of those processes which are directly or indirectly
organic to knowledge but do not constitute or enter into it,
much more is it true of the man capable of knowledge, that
in himself he is not an animal, not a link in the chain of
natural becoming, in part any more than at all.
CH.II1] THE FREEDOM OF MAN AS INTELLIGENCE 91
80. The question whether a man himself, or in himself,
is a natural or animal being, can only mean whether he is
so in respect of that which renders him conscious of himself.
There is no sense in asking what anything in itself is, if it
has no self at all. That which is made what it is wholly by
relations to other things, neither being anything but their
joint result nor distinguishing itself from them, has no self
to be enquired about. Such is the case with all things in
inorganic nature. Of them at any rate the saying ' Natur
hat weder Kern noch Schale ' is true without qualification.
The distinction between inner and outer, between what they
are in themselves and what they are in relation to other
things, has no application to them. In an organism, on the
other hand, the distinction between its relations and itself
does appear. The life of a living body is not, like the
motion of a moving body, simply the joint result of its
relations to other things. It modifies those relations, and
modifies them through a nature not reducible to them, not
constituted by their combination. Their bearing on it is
different from what it would be if it did not live ; and there is
so far a meaning in saying that the organism is something
in itself other than what its relations make it — that, while it
is related to other things according to mechanical and
chemical laws, it has itself a nature which is not mechanical
or chemical. There is a significance, accordingly, in the
enquiry what this nature in itself is, which there is not in
the same enquiry as applied to anything that does not live.
But the living body does not, as such, present its nature to
itself in consciousness. It does not consciously distinguish
itself from its relations. Man, on the other hand, does so
distinguish himself, and his doing so is his special distinction.
The enquiry, therefore, what he in himself is, must refer not
merely to a character which he has as more, and other, than
a joint result of relations to other things — such a character
he has as simply living, — but to the character which he has
as consciously distinguishing himself from all that happens
to him.
92 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. 1
81. Now this distinction by man of himself from events
is no less essentially different from any process in time or
any natural becoming than is the activity of knowledge,
which indeed depends upon it. It is through it that he is
conscious of time, of becoming, of a personal history ; and
the active principle of this consciousness cannot itself be
determined by these relations in the way of time or becom-
ing, which arise for consciousness through its action. The
' punctum stans,' to which an order of time must be relative
that it may be an order of time, cannot itself be a moment
or a series of moments in that order ; nor can the ' punctum
stans' in consciousness, necessary to the presentation of time,
be itself a succession in consciousness. And that which is
true in regard to the mere presentation of time is true also
of everything presented in time, of all becoming, of every
history. To be conscious of it we must unite its several
stages as related to each other in the way of succession ;
and to do that we must ourselves be, and distinguish our-
selves as being, out of the succession. 'hvayKq Spa afuy^ nvm
TOP vovv, &<TiTcp (firjolv Ava^ayopas, iva KpaTJj, tovto S' iariv, Xva
ypaplCn ^. It is only through our holding ourselves aloof, so
to speak, from the manifold affections of sense, as constant
throughout their variety, that they can be presented to us as
a connected series, and thus move us to seek the conditions
of the connexion between them. And again, when the con-
ception of such conditions has been arrived at, it is only
through the same detachment of self from the succession of
its experiences that we can conceive the conditions as united
in their changes by an unchanging law, which, as determin-
ing the order of all events in time, is itself unaffected by time.
82. Thus, while still confining our view to man's achieve-
ment in knowledge, we are entitled to say that in himself,
i.e. in respect of that principle through which he at once is
a self and distinguishes himself as such, he exerts a free
' Mind, then, must be unmixed with anything else, as Anaxagoras
says, in order that it may master things ; that is, in order that it may
know them. Arist. de anim. III. iv. 4.
CH.III] THE FREEDOM OF MAN AS INTELLIGENCE
93
activity, — an activity which is not in time, not a link in the
chain of natural becoming, which has no antecedents other
than itself but is self-originated. There is no incompatibility
between this doctrine and the admission that all the processes
of brain and nerve and tissue, all the functions of life and
sense, organic to this activity (though even they, as in the
thinking man, cannot, for reasons given, properly be held to
be merely natural), have a strictly natural history. There
would only be such an incompatibility, if these processes and
functions actually constituted or made up the self-distinguish-
ing man, the man capable of knowledge. But this, as we
have seen, is what they cannot do. Human action is only
explicable by the action of an eternal consciousness, which
uses them as its organs and reproduces itself through them.
The question why there should be this reproduction, is
indeed as unanswerable as every form of the question why
the world as a whole should be what it is. Why any detail
of the world is what it is, we can explain by reference to other
details which determine \i; but why the whole should be
what it is, why the mind which the world implies should
exhibit itself in a world at all, why it should make certain
processes of that world organic to a reproduction of itself
under limitations which the use of such organs involves —
these are questions which, owing perhaps to those very
limitations, we are equally unable to avoid asking and to
answer. We have to content ourselves with saying that,
strange as it may seem, it is so. Taking all the facts of the
case together, we cannot express them otherwise. The
unification of the manifold in the world implies the presence
of the manifold to a mind, for which, and through the action
of which, it is a related whole. The unification of the mani-
fold of sense in our consciousness of a world implies a certain
self-realisation of this mind in us through certain processes of
the world which, as explained, only exists through it — in par-
ticular through the processes of life and feeling. The wonder
in which philosophy is said to begin will not cease when this
conclusion is arrived at ; but, till it can be shown to have left
94 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I
some essential part of the reality of the case out of sight, and
another conclusion can be substituted for it which remedies
the defect, this is no reason for rejecting it.
83. Before proceeding, it may be well to point out that
it is a conclusion which can in no wise be affected by any
discovery, or (legitimately) by any speculation, in regard
either to the relation between the human organism and other
forms of animal structure, or to the development of human
intelligence and the connexion of its lower stages with the
higher stages of the intelligence of brutes. Having admitted
that certain processes in time are organic in man to that con-
sciousness exercised in knowledge which we hold to be
eternal, we have no interest in abridging those processes.
If there are reasons for holding that man, in respect of his
animal nature, is descended from ' mere ' animals — animals
in whom the functions of life and sense were not organic to
the eternal or distinctively human consciousness, — this does
not affect our conclusion in regard to the consciousness of
which, as he now is, man is the subject; a conclusion founded
on analysis of what he now is and does. This conclusion
could only be shaken by showing either that a consciousness
of the kind which, for reasons already set forth, we describe
as eternal, is not involved in knowledge, or that such a con-
sciousness can in some intelligible way be developed out of
those successions of feeling which can properly be treated as
functions of the animal system; and this must mean that it
has some element of identity with them. That countless
generations should have passed during which a transmitted
organism was progressively modified by reaction on its sur-
roundings, by struggle for existence, or otherwise, till its
functions became such that an eternal consciousness could
realise or reproduce itself through them — this might add to
the wonder with which the consideration of what we do and
are must always fill us, but it could not alter the results of
that consideration. If such be discovered to be the case, the
discovery cannot affect the analysis of knowledge — of what
is implied in there being a world to be known and in our
CH.m] THE FREEDOM OF MAN AS INTELLIGENCE 95
knowing it, — on which we found our theory of the action of
a free or self-conditioned and eternal mind in man.
84. The question, however, of the development of the
human organism out of lower forms is quite different from
that of the relation between the intelligence exercised in our
knowledge and the mere succession of 'impressions and
ideas,' i.e. of feelings in their primary, or more lively, and in
their secondary, or less lively, stage. Till some flaw can be
shown in the doctrine previously urged, we must hold that
there is an absolute difference between change and the
intelligent consciousness or knowledge of change, which
precludes us from tracing any development of the one into
the other, if development implies any identity of principle
between the germ and the developed outcome. When we
speak of a development of higher from lower forms of intel-
ligence, there should be no mistake about what we mean,
and what we do not mean. We mean the development of an
intelligence which, in the lowest form from which the higher
can properly be said to be developed, is already a conscious-
ness of change, and therefore cannot be developed out of
any succession of changes in the sensibility, contingent upon
reactions of the ' psychoplasm ' or nervous system, how-
ever that system may have been modified by accumulated
effects of its reactions in the past.
To deny categorically on this account that the distinctive
intelligence of man^ his intelligence as knowing, can be
developed from that of ' lower ' animals would indeed be
more than we should be warranted in doing. We have
much surer ground for saying what, in respect of our know-
ledge, we are than for saying what the animals are not. The
analysis of what we do and have done in knowledge, which
entitles us to certain conclusions as to what we must be in
order to do it, is inapplicable to beings with whom we can-
not communicate. If the animals have a consciousness cor-
responding to that which we exercise in knowledge, at any
rate we cannot enter into it. Their actions, as observed from
outside, would seem to be explicable without it — explicable
96 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE
as resulting from the determination of action by feeling and
that of feeling by feeling, in other words as resulting from
successive changes of the sensibility, — without any need for
ascribing to them any consciousness of change, any synthesis
of the modifications they experience as belonging to an inter-
related world. We are thus warranted in saying that we have
no evidence of the presence in ' brutes ' of such an intelli-
gence as that which forms the basis of our knowledge ; and
that, if it is absetit, there can, properly speaking, have been
no development of our mind from such a mind as theirs.
But this hypothetical negation is quite compatible with the
admission that there may have been a progressive develop-
ment, through hereditary transmission, of the animal system
which has become organic to the distinctive intelligence of
man ; that the particular modes of successive feeling upon
which a unifying intelligence supervenes in man, rendering
them for him into a related world, may be the result of a
past experience on the part of beings in whom such intelli-
gence had not yet supervened, and who were in that sense
not human ; and that certain modifications of the sensibility,
arising from this pre-human history, may have been the con-
dition, according to some unascertained law, of that super-
vention of intelligence in man.
BOOK II
THE WILL
CHAPTER I
THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL
85. So far we have been dealing with "what we may
venture to call the metaphysics of experience or knowledge,
as distinct from the metaphysics of moral action. We have
been considering the action of the self-conditioning and
self-distinguishing mind, which the existence of a connected
world implies, in determining a particular product of that
world, viz. the animal system of man, with the receptive
feelings to which that system is organic, — in so determining
it as to reproduce itself, under limitations, in the capacity
for knowledge which man possesses. The characteristic of
this particular mode of its reproduction in the human self is
the apprehension of a world which is, as distinct from one
which should be. It constitutes a knowledge of the con-
ditions of the feelings that occur to us, and of uniform
relations between changes in those conditions. But the
animal system is not organic merely to feeling of the kind
just spoken of as receptive, to impressions, according to the
natural meaning of that term, conveyed by the nerves of the
several senses. It is organic also to wants, and to impulses
for the satisfaction of those wants, which may be in many
cases occasioned by impressions of the kind mentioned, but
which constitute quite a different function of the animal
system.
These wants, with the sequent impulses, must be distin-
guished from the consciousness of wanted objects, and
from the effort to give reality to the objects thus present in
consciousness as wanted, no less than sensations of sight
and hearing have to be distinguished from the consciousness
H
98 THE WILL [bk. II
of objects to which those sensations are conceived to be
related. It has been sufficiently pointed out how the
presentation of sensible things, on occasion of sensation,
implies the action of a principle which is not, like sensa-
tion, in time, or an event or a series of events, but must
equally be present to, and distinguish itself from, the several
stages of a sensation to which attention is given, as well as
the several sensations attended to and referred to a single
object. In like manner the transition from mere want
to consciousness of a wanted object, from the impulse to
satisfy the want to an effort for realisation of the idea of
the wanted object, implies the presence of the want to a
subject which distinguishes itself from it and is constant
throughout successive stages of the want.
So much is implied in the conversion of a want into the
presentation of a wanted object, though the want be of
strictly animal origin, and however slightly the object may
be defined in consciousness. Every step in the definition
of the wanted object irnplies a further action of the same
subject, in the way of comparing various wants that ■ arise
in the process of life, along with the incidents of their
satisfaction, as they only can be compared by a subject
which is other than the process, not itself a stage or series
of stages in the succession which it observes. At the same
time as the reflecting subject traverses the series of wants,
which it distinguishes from itself while it presents their
filling as its object, there arises the idea of a satisfaction on
the whole — an idea never realisable, but for ever striving to
realise itself in the attainment of a greater command over
means to the satisfaction of particular wants.
86. For the present we take no notice of any wanted
objects but such as arise from the presentation by a re-
flecting subject to itself of wants that are of a purely animal
origin. With the exception of the object consisting in a
general satisfaction of such wants, we take no account as,
yet of wants that are of distinctively human origin, of wants
that arise out of conceptions. The form of consciousness
CH. l] THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL 99
which we are considering does indeed differ absolutely from
the mere succession of animal wants ; but it so differs, not
in respect of the presence of such wants as are not of
animal origin, but in virtue of that distinction of self from
the wants, through which there supervenes upon the succes-
sion of wants a consciousness — not a succession — of wanted
objects. It is this consciousness which yields, in the most
elementary form, the conception of something that should
be as distinct from that which is, of a world of practice
as distinct from that world of experience of which the
conception arises from the determination by the Ego of
the receptive senses. Whereas in perceptive experience the
sensible object carries its reality with it — in being presented
at all, is presented as real, though the nature of its reality
may remain to be discovered, — in practice the wanted
object is one to which real existence has yet to be given.
This latter point, it is true, is one which language is apt to
disguise. The food which I am said to want, the treasure
on which I have set my heart, are already in existence.
But, strictly speaking, the objects which in these cases I
present to myself as wanted, are the eating of the food, the
acquisition of the treasure ; and as long as I want them, these
exist for me only as ideas which I am striving to realise, as
something which I would might be but which is not.
Thus the world of practice depends on man in quite
a different sense from that in which nature, or the world of
experience, does so. We have seen indeed that indepen-
dence is not to be ascribed to nature, in the sense either
that there would be nature at all without the action of
a spiritual self-distinguishing subject, or that there could
be a nature for us, for our apprehension, but for a further
action of this subject in or as our soul. It is independent
of us, however, in the sense that it does not depend on any
exercise of our powers whether the sensible objects, of
which we are conscious, shall become real or no. They are
already real. On the other hand, it is characteristic of the
world of practice that its constituents are objects of which
H 2
lOO THE WILL [bk. II
the existence in consciousness, as wanted, is prior to, and
conditions, their existence in reality. It depends on a certain
exercise of our powers, determiried by ideas of the objects
as wanted, whether those ideas shall become real or no.
87. The same thing may perhaps be otherwise stated by
saying that the world of practice — the world composed of
moral or distinctively human actions, with their results —
is one in which the determining causes are motives ; a motive
again being an idea of an end, which a self-conscious
subject presents to itself, and which it strives and tends to.
realise. Now, prima facie, as will be admitted on all hands,
this causality of motives eifectually distinguishes the world
which moral action has brought, and continues to bring,
into being, from the series of natural events. In the latter
the occurrence of an event does not depend on an ideal
of the event, as a desired object, being previously presented]
If then moral action is to be brought within the series of
natural phenomena, it must be on supposition that the
motives which determine it, having natural antecedents,
are themselves but links in the chain of natural phenomena ;
and that thus moral action, though distinguished from other
kinds of natural event by its dependence on prior ideas, is
not denaturalised, since the ideas on which it depends are
themselves of natural origin.
The question whether this is so is the point really at issue
in regard to the possibility and indispensableness of a Moral
Philosophy which shall not be a branch of natural science ;
or, if we like to put it so, in regard to the freedom of moral
agents. It is not the question commonly debated, with much
ambiguity of terms, between ' determinists ' and ' indeter-
minists ' ; not the question whether there is, or is not, a possi-
bility of unmotived willing; but the question whether motives,
of that kind by which it is the characteristic of moral or
human action to be determined, are of properly natural
origin or can be rightly regarded as natural phenomena.
88, If the foregoing analysis be correct, even those mo-
CH. l] THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL loi
tives (defined above) which lie nearest, so to speak, to ani-
mal wants, are yet effectually distinguished from them and
from any kind of natural phenomena. No one would pre-
tend to find more than a strictly natural event either in any
appetite or want incidental to the process of animal life, or
in the effect of such a want in the way of an instinctive
action directed to its satisfaction. But it is contended that
such appetite or want does not constitute a motive proper,
does not move to any distinctively human action, except as
itself determined by a principle of other than natural origin.
It only becomes a motive, so far as upon the want there
supervenes the presentation of the want by a self-conscious
subject to himself, and with it the idea of a self-satisfaction
to be attained in the filling of the want.
89. It is not indeed that the want is intrinsically altered,
or ceases to be a want, through the supervention upon it of
the moral motive, properly so called ; but that, while it con-
tinues or ceases and begins again, there arises a new agency,
other than it, from its presence to a self-conscious subject
which takes from it an idea of an object in which self-satis-
faction is to be sought. And the new agency, thus resulting,
is no more a natural event or process, or the product of any
such event or process, than is the self-consciousness to which
it owes its distinguishing character. We may illustrate the
state of the case from what takes place in physical life. A
chemical process does not cease to be a chemical process
because it goes on in a living organism, but it does become
contributory to a result wholly different from any which,
apart from a living organism, it could have yielded. On
the other hand, life is not a chemical or mechanical process
because chemical and mechanical processes are necessary to
the living body, unless such processes can by themselves
constitute life. No more is any moral action, or action from
motives, a natural event because natural want is necessary to
it, unless the self-consciousness, in and through which a mo-
tive arises out of the want, is itself a natural event or series
of events or relation between events.
I02 THE WILL [bK. n
90. That it is not so is scarcely less plain of self-con-
sciousness, in that relation to want which yields a motive,
than it is of it in that relation to sensation which yields
perception and, through it, knowledge. Can that be an
event or phenomenon, whether in the way of want or other-
wise, which throughout the successive stages, the abatements
and revivals, of a want presents the single idea of the self-
satisfaction to be attained in its filling ; which unites succes-
sive wants in the idea of a general need for which provision
is to be made, and holds together the successive wants and
fillings as the connected but distinct incidents of an inner
life, as an experience of happiness or the reverse ? Can it,
again, be a series of events, either the series of which the
connexion in an inner life thus arises through its action, or
any other series ? Can it, finally, be the connexion or rela-
tion thus arising, or any other relation ? But when we have
rejected all these alternatives, when we have said that the
practical self-consciousness, which is the distinguishing fac-
tor in all motives, is not an event or series of events or rela-
tion-between events, we have said that it is not natural in
the ordinary sense of that term ; not natural at any rate in
any sense in which naturalness would imply its determina-
tion by antecedent events, or by conditions of which it is
not itself the source.
91. If the reader is satisfied by these considerations that
there is something more than natural in the motive to a
moral or distinctively human action, he may be apt to as-
sume— since there is no disputing the dependence on ani-
mal impulse a;t any rate of those elementary motives to which
we have so far confined our view — that animal impulse is
one component of the motive, while self-consciousness is
another ; that the moral agent is partly an animal, partly a
rational or self-realising subject. But against such a view
we should protest as much as previously [§ 68] against the
notion that the presence of a double consciousness in man
was implied in the distinction pointed out between the pro-
cess of sensation in time and its determination by a subject
CH. l] THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL 103
not in time, as alike necessary to perception and knowledge.
If it would be untrue to say of the functions of life that they
are partly chemical, because without chemical processes they
could not be exercised, it is even more untrue to say of a
motive, in the proper sense, that it is partly animal, because,
unless an animal want occurred, it would not arise. The
motive is not made up of a want and self-consciousness, any
more than life of chemical processes and vital ones. It is
one and indivisible ; but, indivisible as it is, it results, as per-
ception results, from the determination of an animal nature
by a self-conscious subject other than it ; so results, however,
as that the animal condition does not survive in the result.
The want, no doubt, may remain along with the new
result — the motive, properly so called — which arises from
its relation to self-consciousness, but it is not a part of it.
Hunger, for instance, may survive along with the motive,
involving some form of self-reference, which arises out of
it in the self-conscious man — whether that motive be the
desire to relieve himself from pain, or to give himself plea-
sure, or to quaUfy himself for work, or to provide himself the
means of living, — but hunger neither is that motive nor a
part of it. If it were, the resulting act would not be moral
but instinctive. There would be no moral agency in it. It
would not be the man that did it, but the hunger or some
' force of nature ' in him. The motive in every imputable
act for which the agent is conscious on reflection that he is
answerable, is a desire for personal good in some form or
other; and, however much the idea of what the personal
good for the time is may be affected by the pressure of
animal want, this want is no more a part or component
of the desire than is the sensation of light or colour, which
I receive in looking at this written line, a component part
of my perception in reading it.
92. Whether our conclusion be accepted or no, it may be
hoped that the point which it is sought to make good in
regard to the distinctive character of motives has at least
been made clear. What instinct is, whether there are in
I04 THE WILL [bk. II
truth merely instinctive actions, is a question on which,
though of late some men seem almost to have argued them-
selves into believing the contrary, there is much more room
for doubt than there is as to the nature and reality of motives
and the moral action determined by them. If we have to
explain what we mean by instinct and instinctive action, we
have to do it by excluding the essential characteristic of our
own motives and motived action. By an instinctive action
we mean one not determined by a conception, on the part
of the agent, of any good to be gained or evil to be avoided
by the action. It is superfluous to add, good to himself;
for anything conceived as good in such a way that the agent
acts for the sake of it, must be conceived as his own good,
though he may conceive it as his own good only on account
of his interest in others, and in spite of any amount of
suffering on his own part incidental to its attainment. By
a moral action, an action morally imputable or that can be
called good or bad, we mean one that is so determined as
the instinctive action is not. Clearly it is nothing but our
knowledge of what moral or motived action is, that gives
a meaning to the negation conveyed in the description of
another sort of action as instinctive. Whether there in fact
are actions, either done by ourselves under certain conditions
or by other agents, that correspond to this negative descrip-
tion can never be known with the same intimate certainty
with which it is known that actions belonging to our con-
scious experience are related to motives in that manner of
which the negative forms the meaning of the description of
any action as instinctive.
93. It is true that it makes no difference to the outward
form of an action whether it is so related to a motive or no;
whether it has a moral quality or — as would be the case, if
it were determined directly by animal want — is merely
instinctive, in the sense of not proceeding from a conception
of personal good. It may have the same effect on the senses
of an onlooker, the same nervous and muscular motions
may be involved in it, the same physical results may follow
CH. l] THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL 105
from it, in the one case as in the other. But it is not by
the outward fornij thus understood, that we know what
moral action is. We know it, so to speak, on the inner
side. We know what it is in relation to us, the agents;
what it is as our expression. Only thus indeed do we know
it at all. In knowledge so derived, where from the nature
of the case our judgments are incapable of verification in
the ordinary sense by reference to matters of fact — for the
motive which an act expresses is not what we commonly
mean by a matter of fact — there is, no doubt, much liability
to arbitrariness in the interpretation of the self-consciousness
to which alone we can appeal. Against such arbitrarinessi
it would seem, we can only protect ourselves by great cir-
cumspection in the adoption of our formulae, so that they may
be as nearly adequate as possible to the inner experience
which we mean them to convey, and by constant reference
to the expression of that experience which is embodied, so
to speak, in the habitual phraseology of men, in literature
and in the institutions of family and political life.
94. However insufficient such safeguards may be, it
remains the case that self-reflection is the only possible
method of learning what is the- inner man or mind that our
action expresses ; in other words, what that action really is.
Judgments so arrived at must be the point of departure for
all enquiry into processes by which our actual moral nature
may have been reached, and into links of connexion between
it and that of animals otherwise endowed. Whatever the
result of such enquiries, it can only be through a confusion
that we allow them to affect our conclusions in regard to
the actuality of our conscious life. Our knowledge of what
that life is may not seldom entitle us to reject speculations
as to a process by which it has come about, on the ground
that such a product as can be legitimately traced from the
process is not the inner life which we know. But no infer-
ence from such supposed processes can entitle us to decide
that this life is not that which a sufficiently comprehensive
view of the evidence afforded by itself would authorise us in
Io6 THE WILL [bk. II
taking it to be ; since the acceptance of this evidence as the
given reality is the presupposition of any enquiry into a
process by which the given reality has come to be.
95. It must be plainly admitted, then, that self-reflection
is the basis of the view here given in regard to the distinc-
tive character of the motives which moral actions represent.
Any one making this admission will of course endeavour to
conduct his self-reflection as circumspectly as possible, and
to save it as far as may be from errors which personal
idiosyncrasy might occasion, by constant reference to the
customary expressions of moral consciousness in use among
men, and to the institutions in which men have embodied
their ideas or ideals of permanent good. In the interpreta-
tion, however, of such expressions and institutions self-
reflection must be our ultimate guide. Without it they
would have nothing to tell ; and it is to it, avowedly, that
we make our appeal when we say that to every action
morally imputable, or of which a man can recognise himself
as the author, the motive is always some idea of the man's
personal good — an idea absolutely different from animal
want, even in cases where it is from anticipation of the
satisfaction of some animal want that the idea of personal
good is derived.
Now a motive so constituted, like the perception which
answers to it in the sphere of speculative intelligence, clearly
admits of being considered in seemingly opposite ways. Two
seemingly incompatible, yet equally true, sets of statements
may be made in regard to it ; which, however, are not really
incompatible, because one relates to the motive in its full
reality, which is not a sensible event, the other to a sensible
event which is implied in it (as sensation is implied in per-
ception) but is not it. The sensible event or phenomenon,
implied in the motive, is, like every other event, determined
by antecedent events according to natural laws. The motive
itself, though it too is in its own way definitely determined,
is not naturally determined. It is constituted by an act of
self-consciousness which is not a natural event, an act an
CH.l] THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL 107
which the agent presents to himself a certain idea of himself —
of himself doing or himself enjoying — as an idea of which the
realisation forms for the time his good. It is true that the
moral quality of this act, its virtue or its vice, depends on
the character of the agent. It is this that determines what
the kind of personal good, which under any set of circum-
stances he presents to himself, shall be. This character, in
turn, has had its history, just as a man's developed intelli-
gence, as it at any time stands, has had a history. But just
as this latter history, though to call it a history ^an eternal
consciousness would be a contradiction, has yet taken its
distinctive nature, as a history of intelligence, from a certain
action of an eternal self-distinguishing consciousness upon
the processes of feeling ; so the history of human character
has been one in which the same consciousness has through-
out been operative upon wants of animal prigin, giving rise
through its action upon them to the speci/ic quality of that
history.
96. The view which it is sought to convey may be made
more plain by an instance. When Esau sells his birthright
for a mess of pottage, his motive, we might be apt hastily to
say, is an animal want. On reflection, if by 'motive' is
meant that which an action represents or expresses, the
inner side of that of which the action is the outer, we shall
find that it is not so. The motive lies in the presentation of
an idea of himself as enjoying the pleasure of eating the
pottage, or (which comes practically to the same thing) as
relieved from the pain of hunger. Plainly, but for his
hunger Esau could have no such motive. But for it his
presentation of himself as a subject of pleasure could have
taken no such form. But the hunger is not the presentation
of himself as the subject of pleasure, still less the presenta-
tion of that particular pleasure as under the circumstances
his greatest good ; and therefore it is not his motive. If the
action were determined directly by the hunger, it would
have no moral character, any more than have actions done
in sleep, or strictly under compulsion, or from accident, or
Io8 THE WILL [bk. II
(so far as we know) the actions of animals. Since, however,
it is not the hunger as a natural force, but his own conception
of himself, as finding for the time his greatest good in the
satisfaction of hunger, that determines the act, Esau recog-
nises himself as the author of the act. He imputes it to
himself, and it is morally imputable to him — an act for which
he is accountable, to which praise or blame are appropriate.
If evil follows from it, whether in the shape of punishment
inflicted by a superior, or of calamity ensuing in the course
of nature to himself or those in whom he is interested, he is
aware that he himself has brought it on himself. Hence
remorse, and with it the possibility of change of heart. He
may 'find no place for repentance' in the sense of cancelling
or getting rid of the evil which his act has caused ; but in
another sense the recognition of himself as the author of the
evil is, in promise and potency, itself repentance.
97. ' But how,' it will be asked, ' does this analysis of
Esau's motive affect the question of his moral freedom?'
We admit at once that, if he is not free or self-determined in
his motive, he is not free at all. To a will free in the sense
of unmotived we can attach no meaning whatever. Of the
relation between will and desire more shall be said in the
sequel. Eor the present the statement may suffice, that we
know of no other expression of will but a motive in the sense
above explained, or, as it may be called to avoid ambiguity,
a strongest motive. Such a motive is the will in act. The
question as to the freedom of the will we take to be a ques-
tion as to the origin of such a strongest motive.
98. The assertion that Esau's motive, and with it the
action which expresses his character, is the joint outcome of
his circumstances and character, however true it may be,
throws little light on the matter, unless followed by some
further analysis of the circumstances and character. One
'circumstance' no doubt is his hunger, and this has a definite
physical history. The physiologist, with sufficient knowledge
and opportunity of examination, could trace its determining
CH. l] THE FREEDOM Of THE WILL
109
antecedents with the utmost precision. But even this hunger,
as it affects Esau's action, is not really what it would be in
relation to a merely natural agent, any more than the visual
sensation, which this flower conveys to an intelligent person
who attends to it, is really the same as that which it conveys
to a merely sentient animal. The want in the one case, the
sensation in the other, may rightly be abstracted from the
self-consciousness by relation to which, in the cases sup-
posed, it is really determined, for the purpose of investigating
those natural conditions and antecedents which are un-
affected by that relation ; but it must not be forgotten that
there is an abstraction in so treating it, and that, when the
moral bearing of the want is in question, the abstraction
may become misleading. The circumstances which in com-
bination with character affect moral action, just because they
are so combined, are no longer what they would be merely
as circumstances. They are not like forces converging on
an inert body which does not itself modify the direction of
the resulting motion. Thus even a- circumstance in itself
and in its antecedents so strictly physical as hunger, if it is
Esau's hunger, the hunger of an agent morally endowed, has
in effect a quality not determined by natural antecedents.
Of the other circumstances bearing on Esau's action, or
of the most important among them, it could not be admitted
that they are merely physical at all, even in their origin or
antecedents as distinct from their bearing on his act. We
may perhaps classify them roughly under three heads — the
state of his health, the outward manner of his life (including
his family arrangements and the mode in which he maintains
himself and his family), and the standard of social expecta-
tion on the part of those whom he recognises as his equals.
All these have their weight in affecting the result which his
character yields under the pressure of animal want, but they
are all of them influences which have come to be what they
are through processes in which human character or will has
been an essential factor. Just as the result to which they
contribute in his conduct only arises from the particular
no THE WILL [bk. II
mode in which the self-presenting and self-seeking Ego in
him reacts upon them, so it is only through previous conduct
similarly determined, on his own part or that of others, that
such circumstances have taken their actual shape. Their
formation at every stage has indeed been affected by events
which, like the particular experience of hunger in Esau's
case, have each had their definite chain of physical ante-
cedents ; but it has only been as determined by relation to
the human self that these events have yielded the given
result in the shape of these particular circumstances. In
the last resort, then, we are thrown back on the question of
the character of the agency so exerted, alike in the formation
of those circumstances by which the motive expressed in any
moral action is affected, and in that reaction of the man upon
the circumstances which actually yields that motive.
99. When we thus speak of the human self, or the man,.
reacting upon circumstances, giving shape to them, taking
a motive from them, what is it exactly that we mean by this
self or man ? The answer must be the same as was given
to a corresponding question in regard to the self-conscious
principle implied in our knowledge. We mean by it a certain
reproduction of itself on the part of the eternal self-conscious
subject of the world — a reproduction of itself to which it
makes the processes of animal life organic, and which is>
qualified and limited by the nature of those processes, but
which is so far essentially a reproduction of the one supreme-
subject, implied in the existence of the world, that the pro-
duct carries with it under all its limitations and qualifications
the characteristic of being an object to itself. It is the
particular human self or person, we hold, thus constituted,
that in every moral action, virtuous or vicious, presents to
itself some possible state or achievement of its own as for.
the time its' greatest good, and acts for the sake of that good.
The kind of good which at any point in his life the person
presents to himself as greatest depends, we admit, on his
past experience — his past passion and action — and on cir-
cumstances. But throughout the past experience he has beea
CH. l] THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL iii
an object to himself, and thus the author of his acts in the
sense just stated. And as for the circumstances, in the first
place they only affect his action through the medium of that
idea of his own good upon which he makes them converge ;
and, secondly, in respect of that part of them which is most
important in its bearing on conduct, they themselves presup-
pose personal, self-seeking ' agency of the kind described.
100. It will probably be objected that it makes no
practical difference to the moral freedom of the individual,
whether or no the circumstances by which he is influenced
are of strictly natural or of specially human origin, so long
as it is not to the individual's own action that they are due.
That there is a sense of 'freedom,' indeed, in which it is
very differently affected by such a ' circumstance ' as hunger
or imminent death, and by such another ' circumstance ' as
the customs and expectations of a society to which the
individual belongs, will hardly be disputed. The freedom
of an action must be taken to mean simply its imputability
in the juristic sense, if it is alleged that it makes no difference
to its freedom whether the agent is influenced in doing it
by the circumstance of pressing physical need, or by the
circumstance that his honour is appealed to by his family or
his state. Before taking further notice, however, of the very
various senses in which freedom is asserted of man, and
of the relation in which our doctrine stands to them, it will
be well to guard against further liability to misapprehension
in respect of the doctrine itself ^
' Do you mean,' it may be asked, ' to assert the existence
of a mysterious abstract entity which you call the self of
' The distinction between that sort of self-seeking which is the
characteristic of all action susceptible of moral attributes, and that
which is specially characteristic of bad moral action, will be considered
in the sequel,
" [The author must have determined, after this paragraph was
written, to omit the fuller account of the diiferent senses of ' freedom '
which was sometimes given in his lectures and is promised here.
It is now printed in the second volume of Green's Works, edited
by, R. L. Nettleship.]
112 THE WILL [bk. 11
a man, apart from all his particular feelings, desires, and
thoughts — all the experience of his inner life?' To such
a question we should reply, to begin with, that of ' entities '
we know nothing, except as a dyslogistic term denoting
something in which certain English psychological writers
seem to suppose that certain other writers believe, but
in which, so far as known, no one has stated his own
belief. That the self, as we conceive it, is in a certain
sense 'mysterious' we admit. It is in a sense mysterious
that there should be such a thing as a world at all.
The old question, why God made the world, has never
been answered, nor will be. We know not why the world
should be ; we only know that there it is. In like manner
we know not why the eternal subject of that world should
reproduce itself, through certain processes of the world, as
the spirit of mankind, or as the particular self of this or that
man in whom the spirit of mankind operates. We can only
say that, upon the. best analysis we can make of our experi-
ence, it seems that so it does. That in thus reproducing
itself, however, it remains an. ' abstract ' self, apart from the
desires, feelings, and thoughts of the individual man, is just
the notion we seek to set aside. Just as we hold that our
desires, feelings, and thoughts would not be what they are —
would not be those of a man — if not related to a subject
which distinguishes itself from each and all of them ; so we
hold that this subject would not be what it is, if it were not
related to the particular feelings, desires, and thoughts, which
it thus distinguishes from and presents to itself. If we are
told that the Ego or self is an abstraction from the facts
of our inner experience— something which we 'accustom
ourselves to suppose ' as a basis or substratum for these,
but which exists only logically, not really, — it is a fair
rejoinder, that these so-called facts, our particular feelings,
desires, and thoughts, are abstractions, if considered other-
wise than as united in the character of an agent who is an
object to himself. The difficulty of saying what this all-
uniting, self-seeking, self-realising subject is — the ' mystery '
CH.l] THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL 113
that belongs to it — arises from its being the only thing, or
a form of the only thing, that is real (so to speak) in its own
right ; the only thing of which the reality is not relative and
derived. For this reason it can neither be defined by
contrast with any co-ordinate reality, as the several forms of
inner experience which it determines may be defined by
contrast with each other j nor as a modification or determina-
tion of anything else. We can only know it by a reflection
on it which is its own action ; by analysis of the expression
it has given to itself in language, literature, and the institu-
tions of human life ; and by consideration of what that must
be which has thus expressed itself.
101. Having said that the self, as here understood, is not
something. apart from feelings, desires and thoughts, but that
which unites them, or which they become as united, in the
character of an agent who is an object to himself, we have
implied that there is a sense in which the self has a history,
though there is another in which it has none. As has already
often enough been pointed out, the eternal subject, which
is the condition of there being a succession in time, cannot
itself exist as a succession. And its reproduction of itself in
man carries with it the same characteristic, in so far as the
man presents himself to himself as the subject to which the
experiences of a life-time and, mediately through them, the
events of the world's history are relative. Such presentation
is a timeless act, through which alone man can become
aware of an order of time or becoming, or can be capable
of such development as can rightly be called moral ; of which
it is an essential condition that it be united by a single con-
sciousness. On the other hand, just as there is a growth of
knowledge in man, though knowledge is only possible through
the action in him of the eternal subject, so is there a growth
of character, though the possibility of there being a character
in the moral sense is similarly conditioned. It grows with
the ever-new adoption of desired objects by a self-presenting
and, in that sense, eternal subject as its personal good. The
act of adoption is the act of a subject which has not come
I
114 THE WILL [bk. II
to be ; the act itself is not in time, in the sense of being an
event determined by previous events; but its product is
a further step in that order of becoming which we call the
formation of a character, in the growth of some habit of wUL
102. We can only express this state of the case by saying
that the form in which the self or Ego at any time presents
a highest good to itself — and it is on this presentation that
conduct depends — is due to the past history of its inner
life; but that, throughout, to make this history there has
been necessary an action of the Ego, which has no history,
has not come to be, but which is the condition of our being
conscious of any history or becoming. The particular modes
in which I now feel, desire and think, arise out of the modes
in which I have previously done so ; but the common
characteristic of all these has been that in them a subject
was conscious of itself as its own object, and thus self-
determined. Whatever influences have determined it have
done so through, or as taken into, its self-consciousness.
It is to the Ego thus constituted, conscious of its nature —
of all that makes it what it is, temper, character, ability —
as its own, that new feelings and desires occur from moment
to moment, upon the suggestion (to use the most general
term) of circumstances. Just as feelings may, and constantly
do, come and go without being attended to, so desires con-
stantly arise and pass without exciting any reaction on the
part of the Ego, without its placing itself in an attitude of
acceptance or rejection towards them. In that case no
action, in the moral sense, takes place, and the character,
in that sense in which it is the basis of moral goodness 'or
badness, is not affected ; though probably even from such
' unconscious ' ^ experiences there remain consequences
affecting the conditions with which the character afterwards
' I use the word ' unconscious ' here advisedly, in order to call
attention to an ambiguity in the use of the term ; which is sometimes
applied in a strict sense to a process which is not one of conscious-
ness at all, but merely nervous or automatic, sometimes in a less strict
s ense to a process of consciousness not attended to or reflected upon.
CH. l] THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL 115
has to deal. In other cases the Ego does react upon the
experience of the moment. Through this reaction, in the
region of knowledge as distinct from practice^ an image
recurring becomes an object to be thought about, a feeling
becomes a fact to be known ; other facts and objects are
recalled from past experience, to be brought into relation
with the given fact or given object, and there is thus con-
stituted an act of speculative thought or knowledge, an
act in which the man sets himself to understand something.
Or, through another form of the same reaction, the Ego
identifies itself with some desire, and sets itself to bring into
real existence the ideal object, of which the consciousness is
involved in the desire. This constitutes an act of will; which
is thus always free, not in the sense of being undetermined
by a motive, but in the sense that the motive lies in the man
himself, that he makes it and is aware of doing so, and hence,
however he may excuse himself, imputes to himself the act
which is nothing else than the expression of the motive.
103. An ambiguity in the use of this term motive has
caused much ambiguity in the controversy that has raged
over 'free-will.' The champions of free-will commonly
suppose that, before the act, a man is affected by various
motives, none of which necessarily determines his act ; and
that between these he makes a choice which is not itself
determined by any motive. Their opponents, on the other
hand, argue that there is no such thing as this unmotived
choice, but that the motive which, possibly after a period of
conflict with other motives, ultimately proves the strongest,
necessarily determines the act. They have to admit, indeed,
that the prevalence of this or that motive depends on the
man's character ; but the character, they say, itself results
from the previous operatiori of motives, by which they
understand simply desires and aversions.
As against the former view it must be urged that, how-
ever we may try to give meaning to the assertion that an
act of will is a choice without a motive, we cannot do so.
Unless there is an object which a man seeks or avoids in
Il6 THE WILL [bk.II
doing an act, there is no act of will. Thus a motive is
necessary to make such an act. It is involved in it, is part
of it ; or rather it is the act of will, in its relation to the
agent as distinct from its relation to external consequences.
On the other hand, the motive which is thus necessarily
involved in the act of will, is. not a motive in the same
sense in which each of the parties to the controversy con-
stantly uses the term. It is not one of the mere desires or
aversions, between which the advocate of 'free-will' supposes
a man to exercise an arbitrary choice, and of which the
strongest, according to the opposite view, necessarily pre-
vails. It is constituted by the reaction of the man's self
upon these, and its identification of itself with one of them,
as that of which the satisfaction forms for the time its
object.
104. We may say, for instance, that there are various
'motives,' i.e. desires and aversions, which tend to make
A. B. pay a debt, others which tend to prevent him from
paying it. He wishes for the good opinion of others, for
the approval of his conscience, for the sense of relief which
he would obtain by paying it. On the other hand, he
wishes for sundry pleasures which he would have to forego
in paying it. Let us suppose that finally the debt is paid.
The act of payment represents, expresses, is made what it is
by a motive ; by the consciousness of an object which the
man seeks in doing the act. This object, however, as an
object of will, is not merely one of the objects of desire or
aversion, of which the man was conscious before he willed.
It is a particular self-satisfaction to be gained in attaining
one of these objects or a combination of them. The
' motive ' which the act of will expresses is the desire for this
self-satisfaction. It is not one of the ' motives,' the desires
or aversions, of which the man was conscious previously to
the act, as disposing him to it ; at any rate, not one of these
or a combination of them, as they were before the deter-
mination of the will, before the man 'made up his mind.'
It is only as they become through the reaction of the self-
CH. l] THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL 117
seeking self upon them, and through its formation to itself
of an object out of them — only as they merge in an effort
after a self-satisfaction to be found in this object,— that they
yield the motive of the act of will, properly so called.
105. This motive does indeed necessarily determine the
act ; it is the act on its inner side. But it is misleading to
call it the strongest motive ; for this implies a certain parity
between it and the impulses which have been previously
soliciting the will. The distinction of greater or less strength
properly apphes only to 'motives' in that sense in which
they do not determine the will — to desires and aversions, as
they are without that reaction of the self upon them which
yields the final motive expressed by the action. It may
very well happen that the desire which affects a man most
strongly is one which he decides on resisting. In spite
of its strength, he cannot make its object his object, the
object with which he seeks to satisfy himself. His character
prevents this. In other words, it is incompatible with his
steady direction of himself towards certain objects in which
he habitually seeks satisfaction.
If we like, we may express the state of the case by saying
that his strength of character overcomes the strength of the
desire. There is no intrinsic objection to this metaphorical
application of the term ' strength ' ; all our terms for what is
spiritual being metaphors from what is physical. But, if we
would save ourselves from being misled by our metaphor,
we must bear two things in mind. In the first place the
power by which the ' strong ' desire or motive is overcome,
is not that of a co-ordinate desire or motive — not that of
a desire or motive in the same sense of the words — but
the power of a desire with the satisfaction of which (as
explained) the man has identified his good, as he had not
identified it with the satisfaction of the desire overcome.
In the second place, the term ' strength ' is not applied in the
same sense to the desire which affects a man, and to the
character which is the man. A ' strong ' desire means gener-
ally a desire which causes much disturbance in the tenour
1 18 THE WILL [bK. II
of a man's conscious life : a strong character means that
habitual concentration of a man's faculties towards the fulfil-
ment of certain purposes, good or bad, which commonly pre-
vents the disturbance caused by strong desire from making
its outward sign, from appearing in the man's behaviour. If
we are sometimes tempted to say that the weakest men have
the strongest desires, the plausibility of such a statement
is due to the fact that the strength of the stronger man's
character makes us ignore the strength of his desires.
What we call a strong character we also call a strong ' will.'
This is not to be regarded as a particular endowment or
faculty, like a retentive memory, or a lively imagination, or
an even temper, or a great passion for society. A strong
will means a strong man. It expresses a certain quality of
the man himself, as distinguishable from all his faculties and
tendencies, a quality which he has in relation to all of them
alike. It means that it is the man's habit to set clearly be-
fore himself certain objects in which he seeks self-satisfaction,
and that he does not allow himself to be drawn aside from
these by the suggestions of chance desires. He need not
therefore be a good man ; for the objects upon which he con-
centrates himself may be morally bad, according to the
criteria of badness which we have yet to consider. But, on
the other hand, the weak man, taking his object at any time
from the desire which happens to affect him most strongly,
cannot be a good man. Concentration of will does not
necessarily mean goodness, but it is a necessary condition
of goodness.
106. According to what has been said, the proposition,
current among ' determinists,' that a man's action is the joint
result of his character and circumstances, is true enough in a
certain sense, and, in that sense, is quite compatible with an
assertion of human freedom. It is not so compatible, if
character and circumstances are considered reducible, directly
or indirectly, to combinations and sequences of natural
events. \X.is so compatible, if a 'free cause,' consisting in a
subject which is its own object, a self-distinguishing and
CH. l] THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL 119
self-seeking subject, is recognised as making both character
and circumstances what they are. It is not necessary to
moral freedom that, on the part of the person to whom it
belongs, there should be an indeterminate possibility of
becoming and doing anything and everything. A man's
possibilities of doing and becoming at any moment of his life
are as thoroughly conditioned as those of an animal or a
plant ; but the conditions are different. The conditions that
determine what a plant or animal or any natural agent shall
do or become, are not objects that it presents to itself; not
objects in which it seeks self-satisfaction. On the other
hand, whatever conditions the man's possibilities does so
through his self-consciousness. The climate in which he
lives, the food and drink accessible to him, and other strictly
physical circumstances, no doubt make a difference to him ;
but it is only through the medium of a conception of personal
good, only so far as the man out of his relations to them
makes to himself certain objects in which he seeks self-
satisfaction, that they make a difference to him as a man or
moral being. It is only thus that they affect his character
and those moral actions which are properly so called as
representing a character. Any difference which circum-
stances make to a man, except as affecting the nature of the
personal good for which he lives, of the objects which he
makes his own, is of a kind with the difference they make to
the colour of his skin or the quality of his secretions. He is
concerned with it, he cannot live as if it were not, but it is
still not part of himself It is still so far aloof from him that
it rests with him, with his character, to determine what its
moral bearing on him shall be. For that moral bearing de-
pends not directly on the physical circumstances, but on the
object which, upon occasion or in view of the circumstances,
he presents to himself The imminence of the same dangers
will make a hero of one man, a rake of another, a miser of a
third. The character which makes circumstances, physically
the same, so diverse in their moral influence, has doubtless
had its history ; but the history which thus determines moral
I20 THE WILL [bk. II
action has been a history o/" moral action, i.e. of action in
which the agent has been an object to himself, seeking to
realise an idea of his own good which he is conscious of
presenting to himself.
107. The less patient reader may here be inclined to
object that, in professing to oppose the naturalistic view of
human action, we have given up the only position that was
worth defending. ' Does not this account of moral action,'
he will ask, ' though you call it a vindication of freedom, lead
to all the practical ill consequences to which the strictly
physical theory of the matter is said to lead? If a man's
character and circumstances together necessarily determine
his action, is he not entitled to say, " I have got my charac-
ter, it matters not how ; my circumstances are given ; there-
fore I cannot help acting as I do " ? And when once he has
learnt to use this language, will there not be an end to shame
and remorse, and to all effort after self-reformation ? ' Such
an objection implies a misconception of the real meaning of
the doctrine objected to, which may be partly due to the
form in which it is commonly stated. That moral action is
a joint result of character and circumstances is not altoge-
ther an appropriate statement of it. It would be better to
say that moral action is the expression of a man's character,
as it reacts upon and responds to given circumstances.
We might thus prevent the impression which the ordinary
statement, in default of due consideration, is apt to convey,
the impression that a man's character is something other
than himself; that it is an alien force, which, together with
the other force called circumstances, converges upon him,
moving him in a direction which is the resultant of the two
forces combined, and in which accordingly he cannot help
being carried.
108. It can only be by some such impression as this that
the objection, just stated, is to be accounted for. It disap-
pears upon a due consideration of what is meant by character.
An action which expresses character has no must, in the
CH. l] THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL I2l
physical sense, about it. The ' can't help it ' has no appli-
cation to it. Where it has any true application the action
is not determined by character, any more than is a sneeze,
or a twitching produced by a galvanic battery. A character
is only formed through a man's conscious presentation to
himself of objects as his good, as that in which his self-
satisfaction is to be found. Just so far as an action is deter-
mined by character, it is determined by an object which the
agent has thus consciously made his own, and has come to
make his own in consequence of actions similarly determined.
He is thus conscious of being the author of the act; he
imputes it to himself. The very excuses that he makes for
it— not less when they take the form of an appeal to some
fatalistic or 'necessarian' doctrine than in a more vulgar
guise^are evidence that he does so. And in such a case
the evidence of consciousness, fairly interpreted, is final.
The suggestion that consciousness may not correspond with
reality is, here at least, unmeaning. The whole question is
one of consciousness, a question of the relation in which
a man consciously stands to objects (those of desire) which
exist only in and for consciousness. If the man is consci-
ously determined by himself in being determined by those
objects, he is so really : or rather this statement is a mere
pleonasm, for the only reality in question is consciousness.
109. It is strictly a contradiction, then, to say that an
action which a man's character determines, or which ex-
presses his character, is one that he cannot help doing. It
represents him as standing in a relation to external agency,
while doing the act, in which he does not stand if his
character determines it. We may say, if we like, without
any greater error than that of inappropriate phraseology, that,
given the agent's character and circumstances as they at any
time are, the action ' cannot help being done,' if by that we
merely mean that the action is as necessarily related to the
character and circumstances as any event to the sum of
its conditions. The meaning in that case is not untrue;
but the expression is inappropriate, for it implies a kind of
122 THE WILL [bK. II
personification of the action. It speaks of the action, as
abstracted from the agent, in terms only appropriate to an
agent whose powers are directed by a force not his own.
It is probably a sort of confusion between the improper
sense in which it may be said that a moral action cannot
help being done, because the outcome of character in con-
tact with certain circumstances, and the proper sense in
which it is said that a man under compulsion cannot
help doing something, which generates the notion that, if
an action is the result of character and circumstances, the
agent cannot help doing it and is a necessary agent. All
results are necessary results. If a man's action is the result
of his character and circumstances, we in effect add nothing
by saying that it is their necessary result. If it is not the
result of character or circumstances, or (as we prefer to say)
if it is not the expression of a character in contact with
certain circumstances, there must be some further element
that contributes to its determination. What is that further
element ? ' Free-will,' some one may say. Yery well ; but
' free-will ' is either a name for you know not what, or it is
included, is the essential factor, in character. Rightly un-
derstood, the ascription of an action to character as, in
respect to circumstances, its cause, is just that which effec-
tually distinguishes it as free or moral from any compulsory
or merely natural action. It is simply a confusion to sup-
pose that, because an action is a result — and if a result, a
necessary result — of character and circumstance, the agent is
therefore a ' necessary ' agent, in the sense of being an in-
strument of external force or a result of natural events and
agencies ; in other words, that ' he cannot help ' acting as
he does. Nay, it is more than a confusion : it is an infer-
ence positively forbidden by the proposition from which it
is inferred. For to say that character is a determinant of
the act, is, as we have seen, to deny that it proceeds from
an agent in this sense ' necessary.'
110. The view, then, that action is the joint result of
character and circumstances, if we know what we are about
CH. l] THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL 123
when we speak of character, does not render shame and
remorse unaccountable and unjustifiable, any more than, in
those by whom it is most thoroughly accepted, it actually
gets rid of them. On the contrary, rightly understood, it
alone justifies them. If a man's action did not represent
his character but an arbitrary freak of some unaccountable
power of unmotived willing, why should he be ashamed of
it or reproach himself with it ? As little does such a view
render the impulse after self-reform unaccountable, or, with
those who accept it bona fide and not as an excuse for the
'sins they have a' mind to,' actually tend to weaken the
impulse. There is nothing in the fact that what a man now
is and does is the result (to speak pleonastically, the neces-
sary result) of what he has been and has done, to prevent
him from seeking to become, or from being able to become,
in the future other and better than he now is, unless the
capacity for conceiving a better state of himself has been
lacking to him in the past or has become lost to him at
present : and that this is not so is shown by the fact that
he does ask the question whether and how he can become
better, even though he answer the question in the negative.
The dependence of a man's present and future on his past
would indeed be fatal to the possibility of that self-reform
which is conditional upon the wish for it, if his past had not
been one in which his conduct was determined by a con-
ception of personal good. But because his past has been
of such a kind, there has been in it, and has been continued
out of it into his present, a perpetual potentiality of self-
reform, consisting in the perpetual discovery by the man
that he is not satisfied ; that he has not found the personal
good which he sought ; that, however many pleasures he
has enjoyed, he is none the better off in himself, none the
nearer to that which he would wish to be.
The capacity for the conception of being better, which
such an experience at once evinces and maintains, forms in
itself both the inchoate impulse to realise the conception,
and the possibility of its realisation. The possibility is no
124 ^^^ WILL [BK.ir
doubt very different from the realisation. The inchoate im-
pulse may be constantly overborne by other impulses, with
the gratification of which the man for the time, from habit
or strength of passion, identifies his personal good. Its
actuaUsation, however, depends simply on its own relative
strength, not on any accessories or command of means.
The prevalent wish to be better constitutes the being better.
Whether or no in any individual case it shall obtain that
prevalence, depends (to use the most general expression) on
the social influences brought to bear on the man ; but the
influences effective for the purpose all have their origin, ulti-
mately, in the desire to be better on the part of other men,
as carrying with it a desire for the bettering of those in whom
they are interested. The ' Grace of God ' works through no
other channels but such as fall under this general descrip-
tion. If, and so far as, in the past and present of individual
men and of the society which is at once constituted by them
and makes them what they are, this desire is operative, the
dependence of the individual's present on his past, so far
from being incompatible with his seeking or being able to
become better than he is, is just what constitutes the defi-
nite possibility of this self-improvement being sought and
attained. If there were no such dependence, if I could be
something to-day irrespectively of what I was yesterday, or
something to-morrow irrespectively of what I am to-day, the
motive to the self-reforming effort furnished by regrets for a
past of which I reap the fruit, that growing success of the
effort that comes with habituation, and the assurance of a
better future which animates it, would alike be impossible.
111. That denial, then, of the possibility of a moral new
birth, which is sometimes supposed to follow logically from
the admission of a necessary connexion between present and
past in human conduct, is in truth no consequence of this
admission, but of the view which ignores the action of the
self-presenting Ego in present and past alike. Once recognise
this action, and it is seen that the necessary relation in which
a man stands to his own past may be one of such conscious
CH. l] THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL 125
revulsion from it, on account of its failure to yield the self-
satisfaction which he seeks, as amounts to what is called a
conversion. But, though there is no valid reason why the
acceptance of ' determinism,' in the sense explained, should
debar us from looking for 'changes of heart and life' in the
individual, it may yet be that a misunderstanding of the doc-
trine does sometimes in some degree tend to paralyse the
moral initiative and weaken the power of self-reform. It is
probably never fair to lay the blame of a moral deterioration
or enfeeblement primarily on intellectual misapprehension ;
but in a speculative age even misapprehension may tend to
promote vicious tendencies, by interfering with the convic-
tion which would otherwise be the beginning of their cure.
The form of misunderstanding on the subject now before us,
most likely to be practically mischievous, will be the con-
fusion, already noticed, between the true proposition that
there is a necessary connexion between character and motive,
and between motive and act, and the false proposition that
man is a necessary agent, in the sense of not being his own
master but an instrument of natural forces. Men may be
found to argue, more or less explicitly, that, if that which he
is depends on what he has been and has done, and if, further,
whatever he may become in the future will depend on what
he now is — that if this is so, as it cannot be denied that it is,
there is no good in his trying painfully to become better ;
that he may as well live for the pleasure of the hour as it
comes. How may such self-sophistication most compen-
diously be met ?
112. In the first place, it should be pointed out that such
language implies in the highest degree, on the part of any
one who uses it, a self-distinguishing and self-seeking con-
sciousness. But for this he could not thus present to him-
self his own condition, as determined by what he has been
in the past and determining what he will be in the future.
Nor unless there were something which he sought to become,
a good of himself as himself Ythich. he sought to attain —
unless he were thus determined by himself as an object to
126 THE WILL [bK. II
himself — could the question, whether there was any use in
trying to improve himself instead of letting things take their
course, have any meaning for him.
It should be shown, secondly, that this self-distinguishing
and self-seeking consciousness, with the yearning for a better
state of himself, as yet unattained, which it carries with it,
in a special sense makes him what he is, and has made that
past history of himself, on which his present state depends,
what it has been ; that therefore, just so far as his future
depends on his present and his past, it depends on this
consciousness, depends on a direction of his inner life in
which he is self-determined and his own master, because his
own object.
Further, it should be shown that, so far from the depen-
dence of his future upon what he now is and does being
a reason for passivity, for letting things take their course
(which means, practically, for following the desire or aversion
of which the indulgence gives him most present pleasure or
saves him most present pain), it would only be the absence
of this dependence that could afford a reason for such
passivity. If I could ' trammel up the consequence ' of that
which at any time I am and do ; if there could be any break
of continuity between what I shall be and what I am j then
indeed I might be reckless of what I do, so long as it is
pleasant, and, in what I allow myself to be, might take no
thought of what it is desirable that I should become. It is
the unthinkableness of any such break of continuity which,
in the presence of the self-distinguishing and self-seeking
consciousness of man, makes it impossible for the most
reckless sensualist to live absolutely for the moment, and
forms the standing possibility of self-improvement even in
him. So long as a man presents himself to himself as
possibly existing in some better state than that in which he
actually is — and that he does so is implied even in his
denial that the possibility can be realised — there is some-
thing in him to respond to whatever moralising influences
society in any of its forms or institutions, themselves the
OH. l] THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL 127
gradual outcome through the ages of man's free effort to
better himself, may bring to bear on him. The claims of the
family, the call of country, the pleading of the preacher, the
appeal of the Church through eye and ear, may at any time
awaken in him that which we call (in one sense, truly) a new
life, but which is yet the continued working of the spirit
which has never ceased to work in, upon, and about him.
113. ' But what becomes of this theory,' the enhghtened
man of pleasure may reply, ' if it can be shown that the
human agent, in that earliest stage of conscious personal
being between which and all the following stages you admit
that there is a necessary connexion, is a result of strictly
physical forces and processes ? Will it not then follow that
the man's life is throughout determined in the same strictly
physical way as is its earliest stage of personal consciousness;
and, this being so, that it is as much a delusion for him to
suppose that he can alter himself for better or for worse, as
it would be for a plant or an animal to suppose so ? Neither
plant nor animal, indeed, is unimprovable. The produce of
the plant can be modified by grafting, and improved by tillage.
Animals can be trained to behave in a way in which, to begin
with, they are incapable of behaving. So man, the highest
of animals, is capable of improvement ; but it must be by
circumstance, it must be initiated from without. The im-
provement, the development, will not come for the wishing.
It will come, for some, in the struggle for existence. To
those for -whom it does not so come it will not come at all,
and they might as well not bother themselves about it.'
114. We answer that the improvement determined by the
wish to be better on the part of the improving subject —
more properly, the improvement which that wish, so far as
prevalent, itself constitutes — has nothing in common with
an improvement of plants or animals such as that referred
to, which is related to no such wish, and, if related to any
wish at all, not to one on the part of the animal or plant
improved. That there is such a wish, at any rate in the
developed man, cannot be denied even by those who may
128 THE WILL [bk. II
profess to regard it as ineffectual. We meet them, then, by
saying that the child which is to be father of the man
capable of such a wish, cannot be the mere child of nature ;
or, conversely, that the mere child of nature cannot be
father of the man, as in our own persons we know the man
to be. More fully : when we say that the character of
a man, and his consequent action, as it at any time stands,
is the result of what his character has previously been, as
gradually modified through the varying response of the
character to varying circumstances, and the registration in
the character of residua from these responses, we must
assume, as the basis of the character throughout, a self-
distinguishing and self-seeking consciousness.
Unless we do so, the proposition stated will not hold good.
No response to circumstances of a being which has not, or is
not, this consciousness, will account for its coming to have
or to be it. Such a being could not be father of the moral
man affiliated to it. It will have to be admitted that the
consciousness necessary to a character and exhibited in
moral action has supervened from without upon the supposed
primitive being. No true development will be possible of
the moral man from the state of being from which he is said
to have been developed, because no true thread of identity
can be traced between the two states. If, recognising this,
we ascribe to the man or child of the past, whose character
and action we suppose to have made the man of the present
what he is, that self-determining consciousness which dis-
tinguishes the man as he is, the same impossibility meets us
again as soon as we try to affiliate this man or child of the
past to mere nature — to treat him as the outcome of natural
forces and processes. It is difficult, no doubt, to understand
the relation to man's self-determining consciousness of that
in him which is merely natural (or, to speak more properly,
of that in him which would be merely natural, if it were not
related to such a consciousness) ; but we do not overcome
the difficulty by ignoring the absolute difference between
such a consciousness and everything else in the world, a
CH. l] THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL 129
difference which remains the same, whether we do or do not
extend the meaning of ' nature ' so as to include modes of
being thus absolutely different. In its primitive, no less than
in its most developed form, the self-determining' conscious-
ness as little admits of derivation from that which has or is
it not, as life from that which has or is it not.
The statement then, that the human being, in the earliest
stage of his conscious existence, between which and all the
following stages there is a necessary connexion, is a result of
forces and processes which exclude a self-determining con-
sciousness,— though if it were admitted, it would be fatal to
any doctrine of human freedom ,^ — cannot be admitted with-
out self-contradiction. The earlier stage will not, under any
modification by circumstances, account for the latter, if it is
the result of the processes described, or unless it already
involves the self-determining consciousness which carries
freedom with it in all modes of its existence. Should the
question be asked, If this self-consciousness is not derived
from nature, what then is its origin ? the answer is that it
has no origin. It never began, because it never was not. It
is the condition of there being such a thing as beginning or
end. Whatever begins or ends does so for it or in relation
to it.
K.
CHAPTER II
DESIRE, INTELLECT, AND WILL
115. The ground upon which, rightly or wrongly, the
reducibility of moral conduct to a series of natural pheno-
mena, and with it the possibility of a physical science of
ethics, is here denied, should by this time be sufficiently
plain. It lies in the view that in all conduct to which moral
predicates are applicable a man is an object to himself;
that such conduct, equally whether virtuous or vicious,
expresses a motive consisting in an idea of personal good,
which the man seeks to realise by action; and that thd
presentation of such an idea is not explicable by any
series of events in time, but imphes the action of an eternal
consciousness which makes the processes of animal life
organic to a particular reproduction of itself in man. The
first impression of any one reading this statement may
probably be that in our zeal to maintain a distinction of
ethics from natural science we have adopted a view which,
if significant and true, would take away the only intelligible
foundation of ethics by reducing virtuous and vicious action
to the same motive ; a motive the rejection of which by the
will we virtually declare to be impossible, by treating it as
itself the act or expression of will. In order to avoid mis-
apprehension on this point, and to explain how we under-
stand that distinction between the good and the bad will
which undoubtedly forms the true basis of ethics, it will be
necessary to enter on a fuller discussion of the nature of
Will, in its relation to Desire and Reason.
lie. We are all familiar with the quasi-personifications of
Desire, Reason, and Will, which in one form or another
have governed the language of moral philosophy in all ages
in which such philosophy has existed. Sometimes desire
and reason have been represented as inviting the man in
DESIRE, INTELLECT, AND WILL 131
different directions, while the will has been supposed to
decide which of the two directions shall be followed.
Sometimes the opposition has been represented as lying
rather between different desires, of which reason however
(according to the supposition) supplies the object to the
one, while some irrational appetite is the source of the
other; the will being the arbiter which determines the
action according to the rational or irrational desire. Mean-
while criticism has been always ready to suggest that the
only possible conflict is between desires, to which reason is
related only as the minister who counts the cost and
calculates means, without having anything to do with their
initiation or their direction to an end ; that the only tenable
distinction between irrational and rational desires is really
one between desire for the nearer pleasure "and desire for
the more remote, or between desire for a pleasure which
a just calculation would pronounce to be overWanced by
the pains incidental to or consequent upon its ahdnment,
and desire for one not liable to be thus cancelleaiQ the
total result'.
When this view is accepted, the will is naturally taken to "
be merely a designation for any desire that happens for the
time to be strong enough to determine action. ' No doubt,'
it will be said, ' there is a particular class of the phenomena
observable by the inner sense — a class called acts of will —
which are distinguished from other events that take place
in nature as being directed by our feeling. But we are not
entitled to suppose that in the case of each man there is
really a single agent or power exerted in his acts of willing,
a single basis of these phenomena. To do so would be
of a piece with the logical fiction of "things" underlying
the several groups of phenomena which we connect by
a common name. Any act of willing is the result of the
manifold conditions which go to constitute the feeling by
which it is directed — conditions most various in the various
cases of willing.'
' Cf. Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, Book II. Part III. §§ 3, 4.
K 2
133 THE WILL [bk. II
The same criticism may be applied to our usual assump,
tions in regard to 'desire,' and 'intelligence' or 'reason,'
which we are apt to distinguish from will, as faculties having
something in common with it and yet different from it.
' No doubt,' it may be said, ' there are certain inner acts or
phenomena which in virtue of certain resemblances we
describe by the common name " desire ; " others which on
a similar ground we designate "perceptions," "conceptions"
and "inferences," and afterwards reduce to the higher genus
of intellectual acts. But we are deceived by a process of
language if, having arrived at an abstract term to indicate
the elements of likeness in these several groups of pheno-
mena, we allow ourselves to believe in the existence of
a single agent or faculty — desire as such — underlying the
manifold desires of this or that man, and of another such
faculty ^-intelligence or reason as such — underlying his
manifold perceptions, conceptions and inferences.'
117. We have then first to enquire whether there is any
real unity corresponding to the several terms, desire, intelli-
gence, will, on the part of spiritual principles to which these
terms are appropriate. Do they merely indicate each certain
resemblances between certain sets of inner phenomena,
a single point of view from which these several sets of
phenomena may be regarded, and thus a unity not in the
phenomena themselves but on the part of the person con-
templating them ? Or is there, on the other hand, a single
principle which manifests itself under endless diversity of
circumstance and relation in all the particular desires of
a man, and is thus in virtue of its own nature designated
by a single name? And, in like manner, are our acts
of intelligence and will severally the expression of a single
principle, which renders each group of acts possible and is
entitled in its own right to the single name it bears ? We
shall find reason to adopt this latter view, The meaning
we attach to it, however, is not that in one man there are
three separate or separable principles or agents severally
underlying his acts of desire, understanding, and will. We
CH. ll] DESIRE 133
adopt it in the sense that there is one subject or spirit,
which desires in all a man's experiences of desire, under-
stands in all operations of his intelligence, wills in all his
acts of willing; and that the essential character of his desires
depends on their all being desires of one and the same
subject which also understands, the essential character of
his intelligence on its being an activity of one and the same
subject which also desires, the essential character of his acts
of will on their proceeding from one and the same subject
which also desires and understands.
118. Let us begin with the further consideration of desire.
The distinction has already been pointed out between
instinctive impulse and desire of that kind which is a factor
in our human experience. The latter involves a conscious-
ness of its object, which in turn implies a consciousness of
self. In this consciousness of objects which is also that
of self, or of self which is also a consciousness of objects,
we have the distinguishing characteristic of desire (as we
know it), of understanding and of will, as compared with
those processes of the animal soul with which they are apt
to be confused. And this consciousness is also the common
basis which unites desire, understanding, and will with each
other. Our habitual language for expressing the life of the
soul naturally lends itself to obscure the distinction upon
which it is important here to insist. We constantly speak
of sensation as if it were in itself a consciousness of an
object by which it is excited. We speak of feeling this
thing and that, which we no doubt do feel, but which we
only feel because we are self-conscious ; because in feeling
we distinguish ourselves from the feelings as their subject.
The confusion is complicated by the common usage of
feeling and consciousness as equivalent terms ; which makes
it difficult to mark the difference between the fee/ing of self,
implied in all pleasure and pain, and that distinguishing
presentation of self, as at once the subject of feelings and
other than them, which properly constitutes self-conscious-
ness. Nor when we have recognised the distinction between
134 THE WILL [bk. II
-mere feeling and feeling as it is in the self-conscious man, is
it easy to express it. If we use one set of terms, we fail to
convey the difference between sensation, as the affection of
a soul or of an individual subject properly so called, and
any affection of one material thing by another. Adopting
another set of terms, we seem to fall into the error just
noticed, of identifying mere sensation with the consciousness
of self and object.
119. The unity of an individual soul is implied in all feel-
ing ; or perhaps we should rather say that feeling constitutes
the unity of the individual soul. The individual animal is
not merely one for us, who contemplate the connexion be-
tween the members organic to its life. It is one in itself, as
no material atom or material compound is, in virtue of the
common feeling through which, if one member suffer, all
the members suffer with it. It is not one, as the atom is
supposed to be, in the sense of being absolutely simple and
excluding everything else from itself. Nor is it one, like
the material universe, merely in respect of unity of relation
between manifold elements. It is one in the sense that
upon certain occurrences in the parts of a peculiarly consti-
tuted body there supervenes feeling, which is not any one
or number of the occurrences, nor a result of their combi-
nation, in the sense of being analysable into them ; which
does not admit of being analysed into or explained by any-
thing else, and would therefore be unknown but for our im-
mediate experience of it ; which, while it is not the attribute
of any or all of the elements organic to it, is incommunica-
bly private to a subject experiencing it, affected by the past
and affecting the future of that particular subject, his own
and not another's.
The question of the distinction between animals and
plants, the question whether all ' animals ' feel, whether any
' plants ' do, is one of classification with which we are not
here concerned. However such a question may be answered,
it does not affect the importance of noticing the distinctive
nature of the individuality which feeling constitutes. It is
CH. Il] DESIRE 135
only indeed from experience of ourselves, not from observa-
tion of the animals, that we know what this individuality is ;
but according to all indications we are justified in ascribing
it at any rate to all vertebrate animals. To say that they feel
as men do, or that they are individual in the same sense as
men, is misleading, because it is to ignore the distinctive
character given to human feeling and human individuality
by a self-consciousness which we have no reason to ascribe
to the animals. But the assertion that they feel no less, and
are no less individual, than ourselves seems to be within the
mark. And if by desire we mean no more than that felt
impulse after riddance from pain which pain carries with it
to the individual, or that felt want which survives a feeling
of pleasure ; if by will we mean no more than ' activity de-
termined by feeling;' then we cannot do otherwise than
ascribe desire and will to the animals.
120. But though feeling, in the sense explained, consti-
tutes individuality, it does not in that sense amount to the
full individuality of man. It does not make the human
self what it is. Each of us is one or individual, not merely
in the sense that he feels and is so far conscious, but in the
sense that he presents his feelings to himself, that he dis-
tinguishes himself from them, and is conscious of them as
manifold relations in which he, the single self, stands to the
world, — in short, as manifold facts. It is thus only as self-
conscious that we are capable of knowledge, because only
as self-conscious that we are aware of being in the presence
of facts. Only in virtue of self-consciousness is there for us
a world to be known. In that sense man's self-consciousness
is his understanding. This does not of course mean that
the abstract form of self-consciousness is an intelligence of
facts. We know nothing of self-consciousness apart from
feeling, and are probably entitled to assume that there is no
such thing. The self-consciousness therefore of which we
speak includes feeling; not indeed feeling as it is before
the stage of self-consciousness is reached, but feeling as it
is for the self-conscious soul, or feeling as manifold recog-
136 THE WILL [bk. n
nised relation to an objective world. In this reality of its
existence, in this actual co-operation with the senses, self-
consciousness is the faculty of understanding, which in its
full activity, with the progressive analysis of that which the
Senses contain or reveal, becomes knowledge, or the actual
understanding of a world. In the same way self-conscious-
ness is the faculty or possibility of desire, in so far as it
is the characteristic of desire to be directed to objects pre-
sent to the mind of the person desiring them.
If this statement seems strange, it is because we are
misled by our habit of abstraction. Regarding self-con-
sciousness in unreal detachment from the sensations which
to the self-conscious soul become intelligible facts, we find
a paradox in the statement that it is the basis of under-
standing. For a like reason, because we are habituated
to abstract self-consciousness from the wants and impulses
which are the sequela of sensation, we stumble at the notion
of our desires being founded on self-consciousness. We
suppose self-consciousness, in short, apart from a soul and
from the activities of sense and appetite which belong to
a soul before self-consciousness supervenes. We then
oppose it to those very faculties and acts of desire and
understanding which are really its expression, in the sense
that it is only as self-conscious that the soul exhibits them.
No doubt, if self-consciousness were not the self-conscious-
ness of a soul, if it did not supervene upon a sentient and
appetitive life, it would not exhibit itself as understanding
and desire; but neither would it be what it is at all. The
forms of psychical activity on which it supervenes are
carried on into it, though with a character altered by its
supervention. They form its content, its filling; not one,
however, which remains what it was upon the first mani-
festation of self-consciousness in the soul, but one which is
constantly taking new determinations to itself through the
activity of which self-consciousness is the distinguishing form.
121. Just as the action of self-consciousness in under-
standing becomes apparent as soon as we ask ourselves
CH. Il] DESIRE 137
how the facts with which our intelligence deals come to
be there for us — how occurrences of sensation come to be
apprehended by us as facts — so its action in desire becomes
apparent as soon as we ask ourselves how the objects to
which our desires are directed, and which make them what
they are, come to arise in our minds. To take an elemen-
tary instance, how do we come to desire food? Because
we are hungry, is the answer that first suggests itself. But,
before we accept the answer, we must enquire more care-
fully what we mean by the desire. Do we mean by it (i)
hunger itself, as a particular sort of painful feeling ; or
(2) an instinctive impulse to obtain food, excited by this
painful feeling but without consciousness of an object to
which the impulse is directed ; or (3) an impulse excited by
the image of a pleasure previously experienced in eating,
such as we seem to notice in a well-fed dog or cat when the
dinner-bell rings ; or {4) desire for an object in the proper
sense ; /. e. for something which the desiring subject presents
to itself as distinct at once from itself, the subject that desires,
and from other objects which might be desired but for the
time are not ?
It is only if we understand ' desire for food ' in the second
of these senses that any one can be said to desire food
merely because he is hungry. In the first sense the desire,
being the same thing as hunger, obviously cannot be
explained by it, but only by a physiological account of the
way in which hunger arises. In the two latter senses of
the 'desire for food' hunger does not account for it.
Hunger, whether considered simply as a painful feeling or
as involving an instinctive impulse to remove that feehng,
may exist without the desire for food in either of these
senses. The quest and taking of food do not necessarily
imply more than hunger and an instinctive impulse to
remove it. They do not necessarily imply even the revival
of an image of pleasure previously associated with eating
some sort of food ; much less desire for an object, presented
as such. To begin with, even by the human infant, food
138 THE WILL [bk. II
must be sought and obtained instinctively, without any
previous experience of it as something that will remove the
pain of hunger, without any presentation to the mind of the
removal of pain as an end to which means are to be sought.
If the quest of food must thus in some cases be instinctive, ?'.«.
carried on without consciousness of an object to which it is
directed, there is nothing to show that it is not so in all, ex-
cept where an experience of our own, or an experience which
admits of communication to us, testifies to the contrary.
122. Now that which takes place in the soul of an animal
when hungry and seeking food is not an experience of this
kind. The reason, therefore, which we have for saying of
ourselves or our fellow-men that we desire food as an object
of which we are conscious, does not apply to animals. Those
animals indeed with which we chiefly associate, exhibit all
the signs of impulses to action excited by recurrent images
of pleasure previously experienced, but this recurrence of the
image of a past pleasure does not in itself amount to the
consciousness of a desired object consisting in a particular
pleasure. Self-consciousness is implied in the one as it is
not in the other. The mere revival in a sentient subject of
the image of a past pleasure, with the consequent impulse
after the renewal of the pleasure, does not imply any con-
sciousness by the subject of itself in distinction from the
pleasure, as the subject which has enjoyed it, and may
enjoy it again, and which has also enjoyed other pleasures
comparable with it ; nor any consciousness of an objective
world to which belong the conditions of the pleasure — the
means to it, and its consequences.
123. As our principal concern is to ascertain what desire
in ourselves is, not what desire in the animals is not, we
need not dwell on the objections which naturally suggest
themselves to the view that the actions of animals in all
cases admit of being explained without the ascription to
them of self-consciousness. They are objections which would
probably disappear when once the difference was realised
between the existence of an individual soul and the in-
CH. u] DESIRE
139
dividual's presentation of his individuality to himself— his
distinction of himself from relations in which he stands to
a world. Even when the difference has been apprehended,
the affectionate observer of the dog and the horse may be
slow to admit that their behaviour represents merely the
sequence of impulses upon images of pain and pleasure,
without conscious reference to self or to a world; which
means without either such memory or such perception,
such fear or such hope, as ours. We cannot deny, at any
rate of the beasts friendly to man, that in a certain sense
they learn by experience ; that the processes by which the
trained or practised animal seeks to obtain the pleasure or
avoid the pain, of which the imagination excites its impulse,
imply the association with the imagined pleasure or pain of
the images of many sensations which have been found to
be connected with that pleasure or pain. It is readily
assumed that such habitual sequence of images amounts
to an experience of facts like our own ; to an apprehension
of an objective world, of which the necessary correlative is
consciousness of self. The assumption becomes inveterate
through the practice of describing the behaviour of animals
in terms derived from our own experience, — a practice
constantly becoming more prevalent, as the description of
animal life becomes a more favourite subject of literary art.
It is not to the purpose here to.criticise the assumption in
detail. It is enough to point out that it is an assumption ;
that the consciousness of objects as such, whether objects
of knowledge or objects of desire, is more and other than
any established sequence of images or any direction of
desire by- such sequent images ; and that this consciousness
of objects, whether any animals partake of it or no, is the
characteristic thing in human experience, both in the ex-
perience through which we become acquainted with nature
and in that through which morality arises.
124. The desire for food— to return to that primary
instance — though there are senses in which it is independent
of self-consciousness, is not in those senses an element in
140 THE WILL [bk. n
our moral experience. As a determinant of our action as
men, it is a desire for an object, of the presentation of which
self-consciousness is the condition. Whether we take the
object desired to be the removal of a particular pain or
enjoyment of a particular pleasure, or the maintenance of
life and strength, or some further object for the sake of which
life and strength are sought ; or whether we suppose a wish
for each of these ends to be included in the unity of a will
directed to the taking of food ; in any case the object is
rendered an object to us by a self which distinguishes itself
from its experience. The pain of hunger, the pleasure of
eating, are alike presented as constituents in a universe of
pains and pleasures, which the subject contemplates himself
as possibly suffering and enjoying, and in relation to which
he places the pain or pleasure that for the time predominates
in his imagination. There is for him a world of feeling, how-
ever limited in its actual range yet boundless in capacity, of
which he presents himself as the centre. It is by its relation
to this world that any particular pleasure is defined for him
as an object of desire, and thus, however animal in its origin,
becomes to him, through such reference to a ' before and
after ' of experience, what it is not to the animal that feels
but does not distinguish itself from its immediate feeling.
This being true even of animal pleasure, if desired as an
object or as we desire it, it is more plainly true of such an
object as the maintenance of life and strength, and of any
end for the sake of which life and strength are desired. To
conceive his life as an end, to conceive ends for which he
seeks to live, are clearly the functions only of a being who
can distinguish the manifold of his experience actual and
possible from himself, and at the same time gather it to-
gether as related to his single self.
125. Even those desires of a man, then, which originate in
animal want or susceptibility to animal pleasure, in the sense
that without such want or susceptibility they would not be,
yet become what they are in man, as desires consciously
directed to objects, through the self-consciousness which is
CH. n] DESIRE 141
the condition of those objects or any objects being presented.
And it is only as consciously directed to objects that they
have a moral quality or contribute to make us what we are as
moral agents. To desire food, in the sense either of being
hungry or of having an impulse excited by an imagination of
some pleasure of eating, without reference to a self which
presents the pleasure to itself as a good among other possible
good things, is not a function of our moral nature. If in
our waking and sane life we are capable of such a merely
animal experience at all, it at any rate does not affect us for
the better or worse as men. It has no bearing on the state
of soul or character to which the terms good or bad in the
moral sense are applied. In order to have such a bearing,
however dependent on susceptibilities of the animal soul, it
must take its essential character from that supervention of
self-consciousness upon these susceptibilities through which
a man becomes aware of the pleasure derived from them as
an end which he makes his own.
126. Nor can it be admitted that those desired objects
which are of most concern in the moral life of the civilised
and educated man, who has outgrown mere sensuality, are
directly dependent on animal susceptibilities at all. It is
not merely their character as objects which the man makes
his good that they owe to self-consciousness. The suscepti-
bilities in which the desires themselves originate, unlike the
susceptibilities to the pain of hunger or pleasure of eating,
do not arise out of the animal system, but out of a state of
things which only self-conscious agents can bring about.
The conflict of the moral life would be a much simpler
affair than it is if it were mainly fought over those ' bodily
pleasures,' in dealing with which, according to Aristotle, the
qualities of ' continence and incontinence ' are exhibited.
The most formidable forces which 'right reason' has to
subdue or render contributory to some ' true good ' of man,
are passions of which reason is in a certain sense itself the
parent. They are passions which the animals know not.
Because they are excited by the conditions of distinctively
142 THE WILL [bk. II
human society. They relate to objects which only the
intercourse of self-conscious agents can bring into existence.
This is often true of passions which on first thoughts we
might be inclined to reckon merely animal appetites. The
drunkard probably drinks, as a rule, not for the pleasure of
drinking, but to drown pains or win pleasures — pains for
instance of self-reproach, pleasures of a quickened fancy or
of a sense of good fellowship — of which only the thinking
man is capable. The love which is apt to be most danger-
ously at war with duty is not a mere sexual impulse, but
the passion for a person, in which the consciousness on the
lover's part both of his own individuality and of that of the
beloved person is at the utmost intensity. Our envies,
jealousies, and ambitions— whatever the resemblance between
their outward signs and certain expressions of emotion in
animals — are all in their proper nature distinctively human,
because all founded on interests possible only to self-con-
scious beings. We cannot separate such passions from their
exciting causes. Take away those occasions of them which
arise out of our intercourse as persons with persons, and
the passions themselves as we know them disappear. The
advantages which I envy in my neighbour, the favour of
society or of a particular person which I lose and he wins
and which makes me jealous of him, the superiority in form
or power or place of which the imagination excites my
ambition — these would have no more existence for an agent
not self-conscious, or not dealing with other self-conscious
agents, than colour has for the blind.
127. It should further be noticed that not only do those
desires and passions which form part of our moral experience
depend on the action of a self-conscious soul in respect
of the presentation of their objects, many of them also in
respect of the conditions under which the susceptibility
to them arises, but that the same action is implied in
the manner in which they qualify each other. We are apt
to speak of our desires for this object and that as if each
operated on us singly, or as if each had its effect on us
CH. Il] DESIRE 143
independently of the others, though our conduct may repre-
sent their combined result. But such language is not a true
expression of our experience. We are never so exclusively
possessed by the desire for any object as to be quite un-
affected by the thought of other desired objects, of which
we are conscious that the loss or gain would have a bearing
on our happiness. In reflection upon our motives we
abstract the predominant desire from that qualification,
whether in the way of added strength or of abatement,
which it derives from the belief on the part of the desiring
subject that its satisfaction involves the satisfaction or
frustration of other desires. But it is in fact always so
qualified. Our absorption in it is never so complete but
that the consideration of a possible happiness conditional
upon the satisfaction of other desires makes a difference to
it, though it may not be such a difference as makes its sign
in outward conduct. We do not indeed desire the objects
of our ordinary interests for the sake of our general happi-
ness, any more than for the sake of the pleasure which the
satisfaction of desire constitutes. As has often been pointed
out, if there were not desires for particular objects other
than the desire for happiness, there could be no such thing
as the desire for happiness ; for there would be nothing to
constitute the happiness desired. But in every desire I so
far detach myself from the desire as to conceive myself in
possible enjoyment of the satisfaction of other desires, in
other words, as a subject of happiness ; and the desire itself
is more or less stimulated or checked, according as its
gratification in this involuntary forecast appears conducive
to happiness or otherwise.
128. Even with the man of most concentrated purpose,
the object on which his heart is set— e.^. the acquisition of
an estate, election to Parliament, the execution of some
design in literature or art — though it may admit of descrip-
tion by a single phrase, really involves the satisfaction of
many different desires. The several objects of these admit
of distinction, but they are not to be considered so many
144 THE WILL [bk. II
separate forces combining to make up the actual resultant
motive. No one of them apart from the rest would be what
it is, because each, as it really actuates the man, is affected
by the desire for personal well-being ; and that well-being
presents itself to him as involving the satisfaction of them
all. In the cases of concentrated purpose supposed, the
man has come to identify his well-being with his success in
bringing about a certain event or series of events. To him,
as he forecasts his future, the possibility of that success being
attained (his acquisition of the estate, his election to Parlia-
ment) presents itself as the possibility of his greatest good.
It would not seem so, indeed, unless he had (or had once
had) various desires, each directed to its specific object other
than his well-being, and unless he contemplated the satisfac^
tion of these desires as involved in this particular success ;
but on the other hand no one of these desires would actuate
him as it does, in the way of directing all his effort to the
single end for which he Uves, unless it were strengthened
and sustained by the anticipation of a well-being, in which
he conceives the satisfaction of the other desires to be as
much involved as the satisfaction of this particular one. The
conception of this well-being is the medium through which
each desire is at once qualified and reinforced by all the rest,
in directing the man's effort to that end in which he presents
to himself the satisfaction of them all. In the case of men
whose effort is less concentrated in its direction, who live
with more divided aims, though 'chance desires' have greater
weight, yet none of these is unaffected by the idea of a
happiness not to be identified with the satisfaction of any
single desire.
Now it is only to the self-conscious soul, which dis-
tinguishes itself from all desires in turn, that such an idea is
possible. In this further sense, then — not only as the con-
dition (i) of the presentation of objects, whether desired or
perceived, and (2) of the susceptibilities in which those of
our desires which are of most moral importance for good or
evil originate, but (3) as the source of the idea of happiness —
CH. ll] DESIRE
145
it is self-consciousness that makes the action of desire what
it really is in the life of moral beings. If it is true that no
desire actuates us without qualification by the consciousness
of our capacity for other experience than that which this
particular desire constitutes, then, in that sense, as well as in
the other senses indicated, it is true that every desire which
actuates us has a character that self-consciousness gives it.
The objects of a man's various desires form a system, con-
nected by memory and anticipation, in which each is quali-
fied by the rest ; and just as the object of what we reckon a
single desire derives its unity from the unity of the self-pre-
senting consciousness in and for which alone it exists, so the
system of a man's desires has its bond of union in the single
subject, which always carries with it. the consciousness of
objects that have been and may be desired into the con-
sciousness of the object which at present is being desired.
129. To revert then to the question from which this part
of our discussion started, we shall be right in refusing to
admit that particular desires are the only realities and that
' Desire ' is a logical fiction; right in asserting a real existence
of Desire as such, if by this we understand the one soul or
subject, and that a self-conscious soul or subject, which
desires in all the desires of each of us, and as belonging to
which alone, as related to each other through relation to it,
our several desires are what they are. But if we mean
anything else than this when we hypostatise desire — as we do
when we talk of Desire moving us to act in such or such
a way, misleading us, overcoming us, conflicting with Reason,
&c. — then 'Desire' is a logical abstraction which we are
mistaking for reality. It is thus equally important to bear
in mind that there is a real unity in all a man's desires,
a common ground of them all, and that this real unity or
common ground is simply the man's self, as conscious of
itself and consciously seeking in the satisfaction of desires
the satisfaction of itself.
But the real unity underlying the operations of intelligence
is also the man's self-conscious self. It is only in virtue of
L
146 THE WILL [bK. II
his self-consciousness, as has previously been pointed out,
that he is aware of facts as facts, or that his experience
reveals to him a world of related objects. It is clear then
that we must not imagine Desire and Intellect, as our phrase-
ology sometimes misleads us into doing, to be separate
agents or influences, always independent of each other, and
in the moral life often conflicting. The real agent called
Desire is the man or self or subject as desiring ; the real agent
called intellect is the man as understanding, as perceiving
and conceiving ; and the man that desires is identical with
the man that understands. Yet, on the other hand, to
desire is clearly not the same thing as to understand. How
then is the state of the case to be truly represented ?
130. We commonly content ourselves with saying that
the same person has distinct faculties of desire and under-
standing; and to this statement, so far as it goes, no
objection can fairly be made. It is equally impossible to
derive desire from intellect and intellect from desire;
impossible to treat any desire as a mode of understanding,
or any act of understanding as a mode of desire. No reason
can be given why any perception or conception should lead
to desire, unless the soul has to begin with some possibility
called into activity by the idea, but other than that of which
the activity constitutes the idea — the perception or concep-
tion. And, conversely, we cannot explain how a desire
should set intellectual activities in motion except on a
corresponding supposition. This being so, we must ascribe
to the self-conscious soul or man two equally primitive,
co-ordinate, possibilities of desiring and understanding.
But we may not regard these as independent of each
other, or suppose that one can really exist without the other,
since they have a common source in one and the same self-
consciousness. The man carries with him into his desires
the same single self-consciousness which makes his acts
of understanding what they are, and into his acts of under-
standing the same single self-consciousness which makes his
CH.ll] DESIRE AND INTELLECT I47
desires what they are. No desire which forms part of our
moral experience would be what it is, if it were not the
desire of a subject which also understands : no act of our
intelligence would be what it is, if it were not the act of
a subject which also desires.
This point would not be worth insisting on, if it meant
merely that desires and operations of the intellect mutually
succeed each other; that in order to the excitement of
desire for an object, as distinct from appetite or instinctive
impulse, there must have been a perception, involving at
least some elementary acts of memory and inference ; and
that a desire, again, commonly sets in motion an intellectual
consideration of consequences and ways and means. The
meaning is that every desire which is within the experience
of a moral agent, involves a mode of consciousness the same
as that which is involved in acts of understanding ; every act
of understanding a mode of self-consciousness the same as
that which is involved in desire. The element common to
both lies in the consciousness of self and a world as in
a sense opposed to each other, and in the conscious effort
to overcome this opposition. This, however, will seem one
of those dark and lofty statements which excite the
suspicion of common sense. The reader's patience is there-
fore requested during one or two paragraphs of explanation,
131. Desire for an object may be said generally to be a
consciousness of an object as already existing in and for
the consciousness itself, which at the same time strives to
give the object another existence than that which it thus
has — to make it exist really and not merely in the desiring
consciousness. A man desires, let us suppose, to taste a
bottle of fine wine, to hear a certain piece of music, to see
Athens, to do a service to a friend, to finish a book that
he has in hand. In each case the desired object, as such,
exists merely in his consciousness, and the desire for it
involves the consciousness of the difference between such
existence of the desired object and that realisation of it
towards which the desire strives, and which, when attained,
L 2
148 THE WILL [bK. II
is the satisfaction or extinction of the desire. In that sense
the desire is at once a consciousness of opposition between
a man's self and the real world, and an effort to overcome
it by giving a reality in the world, a reality under the condi-
tions of fact, to the object which, as desired, exists merely
in his consciousness. It is true of course that the bottle of
wine, the piece of music, the city of Athens, exist quite in-
dependently of the consciousness of any desiring subject ;
but these are not the desired objects. The experience of
tasting the wine or hearing the music is the desired object ;
and this does not, any more than the anticipated service to
the friend or the achievement of writing the book, exist while
desired except in and for the consciousness of the person
desiring it. So soon as it existed otherwise the desire would
cease. It is true also that, though the desired object is one
which for the person desiring it remains to be realised — to
have reality given it — yet his desire for it is a real and defi-
nitely conditioned fact. To a superior intelligence contem-
plating the state of the case, the man's desire, with the un-
attained object which it implies, would be as real as anything
else in the world. And further, while it would be apparent
to such an intelligence that it was only in virtue of the man's
self-consciousness that the desired object existed for him, as
such ; only through it that he was capable of such an expe-
rience as that of which, if the desire be not simply sensual,
the forecast moves him ; on the other hand it would be no
less apparent that the desire, however distinctively human,
presupposes and entails some modification of the animal
system. We are here considering, however^ what desire
for an object is to the person experiencing the desire, while
experiencing it, not what it might be to another regarding
it speculatively as a fact. As so experienced, the common
characteristic of every such desire is its direction to an
object consciously presented as not yet real, and of which
the realisation would satisfy, i. e. extinguish, the desire. To-
wards this extinction of itself in the realisation of its object
every desire is in itself an effort, however the effort may be
CH. Il] DESIRE AND INTELLECT 149
prevented from making its outward sign by the interference
of other desires or by the circumstances of the case.
132. Such desire, then, implies on the part of the desiring
subject (a) a distinction of itself at once from its desire and
from the real world ; {b) a consciousness that the conditions
of the real world are at present not in harmony with it, the
subject of the desire ; {c) an effort, however undeveloped or
misdirected, so to adjust the conditions of the real world as
to procure satisfaction of the desire. Let us now turn for
a moment to consider the generic nature of our thought.
Here too we find the same general characteristic, a relation
between a subject and a world of manifold facts, of which
at first it is conscious simply as alien to itself, but which it
is in constant process of adjusting to itself or making its
own. This is no less true of thought in the form of specu-
lative understanding, the process of learning to know facts
and their relations, than it is true of it in the practical
form of giving effect and reality to ideas. We have already
seen how it is only for a self-conscious soul that the senses
reveal facts or objects at all. The same self-consciousness
which arrests successive sensations as facts to be attended
to, finds itself baffled and thwarted so long as the facts re-
main an unconnected manifold. That it should bring them
into relation to each other is the condition of its finding
itself at home in them, of its making them its own. This
establishment or discovery of relations— we naturally call it
establishment when we think of it as a function of our own
minds, discovery when we think of it as a function deter-
mined for us by the mind that is in the world — is the essen-
tial thing in all understanding. It is involved in those per-
ceptions of objects which we are apt improperly to oppose
to acts of understanding, but which all imply the discursive
process of consciousness, bringing different sensuous presen-
tations into relation to each other as equally related to the
single conscious subject ; and it is involved in those infer-
ences and theories of relations between relations which we
commonly treat as the work of understanding par excellence.
ISO THE WILL [bk. 11
Whatever the object which we set ourselves to understand,
the process begins with our attention being challenged by
some fact as simply alien and external to us, as no other-
wise related to us than is implied in its being there to be
known ; and it ends, or rather is constantly approaching an
end never reached, in the mental appropriation of the fact,
through its being brought under definite relations with the
cosmos of facts in which we are already at home.
133. Now if this is a true account of speculative thinking,
which it is our natural habit to put in stronger contrast with
desire than we do practical thinking, it is clear that between
the action of the self-conscious soul in desiring and its action
in learning to know there is a real unity. Each implies on
the part of the soul the consciousness of a world not itself
or its own. Each implies the effort of the soul in different
ways to overcome this negation or opposition — the one in
the way of gathering the objects presented through the
senses into the unity of an intelligible order ; the other in
the way of giving to, or obtaining for, objects, which various
susceptibilities of the self-conscious soul suggest to it and
which so far exist for it only in idea, a reality among sensible
matters of fact. The unity of the self-conscious soul thus exhi-
bits itself in these its seemingly most different activities.
Accordingly, if we understand by thought, as exercised
ex farte nostra, the consciousness in a soul of a world
of manifold facts, related to each other through relation to
itself but at the same time other than itself, and its operation
in appropriating that world or making itself at home in it,
it will follow from what has been said that thought in this
sense is equally involved in the exercise of desire for objects
and in the employment of understanding about facts. In
the one case it appears in the formation of ideal objects
and the quest of means to their realisation ; in the other, it
appears in the cognisance of a manifold reality which it is
sought to unite in a connected whole. This community of
principle in the two cases we may properly indicate by
calling our inner life, as determined by desires for objects.
CH. n] DESIRE AND INTELLECT 15 1
practical thought, while we call the activity of understanding
speculative thought.
134. Nor is this all. The exercise of the one activity is
always a necessary accompaniment of the other. In all
exercise of the understanding desire is at work. The result
of any process of cognition is desired throughout it. No
man learns to know anything without desiring to know it.
The presentation of a fact which does not on the first view
fit itself into any of our established theories of the world,
awakens a desire for such adjustment, which may be effected
either by further acquaintance with the relations of the fact,
or by a modification of our previous theories, or by a com-
bination of both processes. All acquisition of knowledge
takes place in this way, and in every stage of the process
we are moved by a forecast, however vague, of its result.
The learner of course knows not how he will assimilate the
strange fact till he has done so, but the idea of its assimila-
tion as possible evokes his effort, precisely as, in a case
naturally described as one of desire, the idea, let us say, of
winning the love of a woman evokes the effort of the lover
to realise the idea.
Thus the process of our understanding in its most distinc-
tive sense is necessarily accompanied by desire. But can it
conversely be maintained of desire, as we experience it, not
only that it has in common with understanding the essential
characteristics of conscious relation between self and a world,
and of conscious effort to overcome the opposition between
the two, but that it necessarily carries with it an exercise of
understanding in the distinctive sense, as we have just seen
that our exercise of understanding necessarily carries with
it desire? On reflection it will appear to be only some
arbitrary abridgment of our conception of desire which
makes us hesitate to admit that it is so. So soon as any
desire has become more than an indefinite yearning for we
know not what, so soon as it is really desire /<?/• some object
of which we are conscious, it necessarily involves an employ-
ment of the understanding upon those conditions of the
152 THE WILL [bk. II
real world which make the difference, so to speak, between
the object as desired and its realisation. In the primary
stages of desire for an object, when it is either a desire on
the part of a child still feeling its way in the world, or desire
for some object that has newly suggested itself, the appre-
hension of the conditions of its realisation may be of the
most elementary kind ; or, again, the person desiring may
be so familiar with those conditions that he is scarcely
aware of his mind dwelling on them. But in every case,
if desire is consciously directed to an object, and if that
object is presented as still unrealised and as dependent for its
realisation upon the fulfilment of certain conditions not yet
fulfilled— and otherwise it would be an object already
attained, not desired — then a discursive action of under-
standing among those conditions^ essentially the same as
that by which we learn the nature of a matter of fact, is the
necessary accompaniment of the desire. To the extent at
least of an apprehension that there are conditions of which
the fulfilment is necessary to the attainment of the object,
it is implied in that merely inchoate desire (if it is con-
sciously directed to an object at all) which stops short
of initiating any actual exertion for the fulfilment of the
conditions. Without it the consciousness of distinction
between the object as desired, and those conditions of
reality that would satisfy the desire, could not exist.
135. Thus these two modes of our soul's action, desire
and intellect, or practical thought and speculative thought,
have not merely the element in common which is expressed
by the designation of each as thought, but, as has just been
shown, neither action can really be exerted without calling
the other into play. This is so even when the matters of
fact upon which the understanding is employed are such as
neither have any bearing, or are not conceived as having
any, upon the improvement of man's estate, nor make any
appeal to the artistic interest. It is so, again, when the
object, of which the realisation is desired, is merely the
enjoyment of a sensual pleasure. But in other cases the
CH. n] DESIRE AND INTELLECT 153
mutual involution of desire and understanding, of practical
and speculative thought, is even more complete. There are
processes, naturally described as intellectual, in which desire
is not merely involved in the sense that the completion of
the intellectual task is presented as an object which stimu-
lates effort; while on the other hand there are processes
which we naturally ascribe to desire, but in which the intel-
lect is not merely involved as the apprehension of that reality
which the desifed object, as desired, lacks, or as the quest
of means to its realisation. The activity of the artist, not
merely in the region which we call that of the fine arts, but
in any form affected by an ideal of perfect work, from that
of the writer of books to that of the craftsman, we naturally
and properly count intellectual. Yet it is throughout a
realisation of desire. Of the mathematician or man of
science it may possibly be held that he first thinks of his
problem, or of facts not yet intelligible, and that the desire
to solve the problem or to understand the facts is a subse-
quent and distinguishable activity. But with the artist, of
whatever kind, the intellectual consciousness of the ideal,
which initiates and directs his work, is itself a desire to
realise it. An intellectual passion is our natural designation
for his state of mind.
Again, if we consider any of the more worthy practical
pursuits of men, which, as is impUed in calling them
pursuits, are an expression of desire, we shall find not
merely that implication of self-consciousness in the presenta-
tion of the object, which may not be ignored even when
the object is the enjoyment of some animal pleasure, nor
a mere sequence of intellectual action upon previous desire
for an end ; we shall find that the end itself is an object of
understanding no less than of desire. It is only the fallacy
of taking the pleasure that ensues on satisfaction of a desire
to be the object of the desire, which blinds us to this. If
the end of a man whose chief interest is in the better
management of an estate, or the better drainage of the
town where he lives, or the better education of his family,
154 THE WILL [bK. II
6r the better administration of justice, were indeed the
pleasure which he anticipates in the success of his pursuit,
it might be held that, since pleasure (in distinction from
the facts conditioning it) is not an object of the under-
standing, the understanding was not co-operant with desire
in the initiation of his pursuit. But, as has often been
pointed out, the possibility of pleasure in the attainment of
an object presupposes a desire directed not to that pleasure
but to the object ; and the object in the cases supposed is
plainly one that originates in intellectual conception — not
indeed in a passionless intellect, if there is such a thing,
but in a soul which desires in understanding and in desiring
understands. The same is true in regard to objects of less
worthy, more selfish, ambition. The applause of a senate or
a town-council, the government of an empire or a borough, are
objects pursued for their own sake, not for the sake either
of the pleasure of attaining them, or of ulterior pleasures
to which they may be the means; and in order to the
presentation of such objects the soul must understand, in
the proper and distinctive sense, no less than desire.
136. On the whole matter, then, our conclusion must be
that there is really a single subject or agent, which desires
in all the desires of a man, and thinks in all his thoughts,
but that the action of this subject as thinking — thinking
speculatively or understanding, as well as thinking practically
— is involved in all its desires, and that its action as desiring
is involved in all its thoughts. Thus thought and desire
are not to be regarded as separate powers, of which one
can be exercised by us without, or in conflict with, the
other. They are rather different ways in which the con-
sciousness of self, which is also necessarily consciousness of
a manifold world other than self, expresses itself. One is
the effort of such consciousness to take the world into
itself, the other its effort to carry itself out into the world ;
and each effort is involved in every complete spiritual act —
every such act as we can impute to ourselves or count our
own, whether on reflection we ascribe the act rather to
CH n] DESIRE AND WILL 155
intellect or rather to desire. If the ' intellectual ' act implies
attention — and otherwise we cannot ascribe it to ourselves
— it implies desire for the attainment of an intellectual
result, though the result be attained as quickly as, for
instance, the meaning of a sentence in a familiar language
is arrived at upon attention being drawn to it. If the desire
is consciously for an object — and this again is the condition
of its being imputable to ourselves — it implies, as we have
seen, an intellectual apprehension at least of the difference
between the object as desired and its realisation. In all the
more important processes of desire the exertion of under-
standing is implied to a much more considerable extent,
just as in every intellectual achievement of importance
the action of desire is much more noticeable and protracted
than in the case just instanced of intelligent attention to the
import of a proposition, heard or read.
137. But if it be true that all desire is the act of a subject
which thinks in desiring, all thought the act of a subject
which desires in thinking, what is to be said of willing?
Any identification of the will with any form of desire seems
inconsistent with the apparent fact that a man has the
power, however seldom he may exercise it, of wiUing to
resist all his desires, even the strongest, and of acting
accordingly. The existence of such a power has often been
supposed to be the condition of any disinterested perform-
ance of duty ; and the supposition is not one to be lightly
set aside. Apart from any such ' transcendental ' doctrine,
the difference between desire and will, it may be said, is too
firmly established in the experience of men, as expressed in
our habitual language {i.e. in such phrases as 'I should like
to, but I won't'), for all the psychologists to get over it. To
identify the will, again, with thought or judgment seems to
imply forgetfulness of the familiar fact that a man may 'know
the better and prefer the worse.' Even when it is our own
action that is the object of thought, our will as evinced by
action is apt not to correspond with our thought, with our
156 THE WILL [bK. II
judgment of what is best; while our merely speculative
thoughts seem to have as little connexion with the will as a
proposition of pure mathematics has to do with the happi-
ness or goodness of man. Our doctrine that the entire self-
conscious subject, desiring as well as thinking, is concerned
in every complete intellectual act, and in every desire for an
object, may seem to increase the difficulty. If this is so,
what are we to make of the man who is ' torn by conflicting
desires ' ; who under the influence of one desire wills to do
what he knows to be inconsistent with the satisfaction of
another desire, which yet he strongly feels? What of the man
who has the truest thoughts, not merely on scientific matters,
but about the ideal of virtuous conduct — thoughts which on
our doctrine should involve desires— and who yet is led by
desire to act viciously ?
138. Let us first be sure what we mean by a conflict of
desires, and by the resistance of the_will to desire. Does a
man ever really desire, at the same time and in the same sense,
objects which he recognises as incompatible with each other?
Our first answer will probably be : ' Yes ; we are constantly
divided between conflicting desires. This is the explanation
of our irresolution before action, and of our regrets in action.
We are irresolute so long as the strength of competing desires
is evenly matched : we act with regret when, in following the
desire which prevails, we are conscious of foregoing the grati-
fication of another, only less strong.' But the question is
whether, when a man is in that state in which it can truly be
said that conflicting passions are striving for the mastery in
him, he actually desires an object at all ; and whether, con-
versely, when his desire is consciously directed to a certain
object, he at the same time and in the same sense desires
another object, which is neither included in it nor a means
to it, but recognised as incompatible with it. At any rate, if
we are to allow that in the divided state of mind supposed he
desires an object at all, it is in quite a different sense that he
desires the object which, when the scale is finally turned, he
' makes up his mind ' to pursue. And, again, he desires this
CH. ll] DESIRE AND WILL
157
object for the time in quite a different sense from that in
which he can be supposed at the same time to desire the
object which has come off second best in his choice. The
object of his final pursuit is one which he desires in the sense
that for the time he identifies himself with it. Living for
himself (as he necessarily does) he lives for it. The single
self of which he is conscious, the unit in which all the in-
fluences of his life centre, but which distinguishes itself from
them all, is for the time directed to making it real. It is not
in this sense that any of the objects are desired, between
which his interests are divided while he is in the state of
irresolution. If it were, there would be no suspense of
action. Nor is it thus that the objects are desired of which
he is still aware as having attractions for him after he has
made up his mind to pursue another incompatible object.
If it were, he would not be pursuing the other.
139. There are two familiar ways of dealing with the
distinction here pointed out. It may be said {a) that the
difference between the sense in which a man desires sundry
incompatible objects, when he cannot make up his mind
between them, and the sense in which he finally desires the
object of his ultimate preference, is merely that in the latter
case one of the competing desires has become stronger than
all the rest. The man may be supposed still to continue to
desire any of the objects which he does not pursue, just in
the same way as he desires the object which he does prefer
and pursue at the very time that he prefers the latter. The
difference may be held to lie merely in the strength of the
several desires ; the satisfaction of the strongest, when the
incompatibility of their several objects has become apparent,
being that which is finally pursued. It may be said {b) that
the difference pointed out is just that between desire and
will. The desires between which we have supposed a man
to be suspended, it may be argued, are desires properly so
called, while the ' desire ' with which he pursues the object
to which his preference is finally given, is not properly desire
but will. Thus any of the objects which he desired in the
158 THE WILL [bk. 11
State of irresolution he may continue to desire when his mind
is made up, though his will is otherwise directed.
140. Neither of these views can be quite accepted. If
we are to admit that the man, suspended for the time
between desires of which he knows the several satisfactions
to be incompatible, desires incompatible objects, instead of
rather saying that for the time he desires no object at all,
since he does not seek to realise the idea of any object ; at
any rate the inward relation of the man towards the incom-
patible objects, between which his desires are divided, is
wholly different from his relation towards that which he
finally prefers. His relation towards the latter, again, is
wholly different from his relation towards that which he is
supposed still to desire though not to pursue. And this
difference is not appropriately described as one between
different degrees of strength of desire.
We will suppose a man divided between hatred of a rival
whom he has opportunity of injuring, and some sense of
duty (however that is to be explained), or fear of conse-
quences, which inclines him to do to his rival as he would
be done by. Here is a conflict of passions or emotions by
which the man, so far as any action towards his rival goes,
is for the time paralysed. Hatred of his rival stirs him, the
idea of doing the magnanimous thing attracts him, fear of
discredit deters him, but the total effect of these influences
is not such that any definite object of desire presents itself
to him of which he se^ks the realisation. We will suppose
that some fresh provocation intensifies the hatred, that he
finally gives way to it and does the wrong from which he
had previously abstained; or, on the other hand, that by
some bright example or some warning voice the counter
influences are strengthened, and that he does a service, or
at least an act of justice, to the rival. In neither case is the
result truly described by saying that the desire which the
action represents is simply the continuation, in greater rela-
tive strength, of one among several which were previously
competing in the man. It differs in kind from the competing
CH. Il] DESIRE AND WILL 159
influences. It is what none of them were while competing,
what none of them are, so far as any of them survive along
with it. It implies, as did none of them, the presentation of
an object with which the man for the time identifies himself
or his good, and a consequent effort to realise this object.
However connected with an intensification of one of the
previously competing passions, it is a distinctly new motive,
arising out of a changed relation of the man himself to the
competing passions. He now, as he did not before, con-
sciously directs himself to the realisation of a desired object.
If he desired before, it is at any rate in another way that he
desires now.
141. This is equally the case, whether the object for which
he acts is that suggested by his hatred or that suggested by
his conscience. When it is the pure desire to do the nobler
thing, or this as reinforced by fear of discredit, that governs
the man's final conduct, the impropriety of treating it as a
continuation of one of the previously competing passions,
which has finally gained superior strength, is most apparent.
The disturbance of the inner life, caused by such passion as
hatred or love, is so marked in comparison with such an
emotion as a sense of duty or fear of discredit, that to speak
of the latter as prevalent in virtue of its superior strength as
^ passion strikes us at once as unreal. It is accordingly to
the example of virtuous resolution, maintained in spite of
some violent passion, that the appeal is commonly made by
those who would distinguish will from strongest desire. And
the distinction is a true one, if it means that the motive ex-
pressed in a man's action differs in kind, and not merely in
degree of strength, from passions of which the competition
suspends his action or with which he has to struggle when
he finally acts. But the distinction holds good just as much
if, in the case supposed, the man finally acts to gratify his
hatred, to realise the idea of crushing his rival, as if he takes
the opposite course. Between the man's state of mind while
his hatred is merely a competing passion, and his state of
tnind when acting for the gratification of his hatred, the
l6o THE WILL [bk. n
difference does not lie in the degree of strength attained by
the hatred, but in the fact that in the latter state the gratifi-
cation of the hatred has become what it was not in the
former, an object which the man seeks to realise, one which
for the time he has made his good.
142. The distinction, then, between ' desires ' of which
the competition suspends action, and the ' desire ' which
expresses itself in a morally imputable action— visible or
invisible, overt or only intended — is not to be understood
as lying in the greater relative strength of the latter. Rather,
if the term 'desire' is to be employed in both cases, it should
be understood that it is used in different senses, for in the
one case the man consciously directs himself to the realisa-
tion of an ideal object (though perhaps not so as to commit
an ' overt act '), in the other he does not so direct himself.
On the other hand, if we say, according to the second view
(p) mentioned above, that the final preference, represented
by the actual pursuit of an object after an interval of sus-
pense between competing passions, is not a desire but an
act of will, we must say the same of the actual pursuit of an
object, even though there has been no previous suspense or
conflict of desires. There is nothing in the fact that the
direction of the man's powers to the realisation of an object
in one case supervenes upon a period of divided mind, and
in another case does not, to justify us in acscribing it to
desire in the latter case if we do not in the former. Yet
when a man sets himself to gain the love of a woman or to
save a friend's life, without another course of action sug-
gesting itself to him as possible, who would question that
he desired the object or that his action was an expression
of desire ? But if the principle of action is desire in such
cases, why should the fact of its being accompanied by the
consciousness of a gratification, otherwise possible, having
been forgone, or the fact that, before it was in operation as
a principle of action, the man was for a time divided
between the attractions of different objects, make it any the
less desire in those cases where it is supposed to be dis'
CH.ll] DESIRE AND WILL l6l
tinctively ' will ' ? If, however, it is thus difficult to suppose
the principle of action to be a will which is not desire, in
the case of an action which follows upon an interval of
divided mind, it is equally difficult to regard it as a desire
which is not a will in the contrasted case, that of the man
who is said to act upon impulse. If in such a case, being
constrained to admit that the action proceeds from desire,
we persist in our opposition between desire and will, we
shall have to say that it is not willed. And it will follow
that, just so far as a man is ' single-minded,' he has no will ;
that the voluptuary who has no scruples, the saint who has
no temptations, the enthusiast who never hesitates, are so
far involuntary agents.
143. The reader may here fairly object, with some im-
patience, that we have had enough of disputation about the
mere usage of the terms desire and will. We no doubt
often use the term ' desire ' for impulses or inward solicita-
tions of which the man is conscious, but which do not
amount to a conscious direction of himself to the realisation
of an object imagined or conceived. We say that a man
desires what his will rejects. But we represent such a state
of the case quite as naturally by saying that, although such
and such objects have attractions for the man, yet on the
whole he does not desire them but only the object for which
he acts. On the other hand, though we now most com-
monly apply the term 'will' to the direction of the conscious
self to action, as opposed to a mere wish not amounting to
such direction, yet the usage has been by no means uniform.
' My poverty but not my will consents,' says the seller of
poisons in ' Romeo and Juliet.' Here the consent, though
said not to be of the will, might have been enough to hang
for. The will is only the strong competing wish which does
not suffice to determine action. Compare the outburst of
St. Paul, as rendered in our authorised translation, — 'To
will is present with me, but how to perform that which is
good I find not.' But though we cannot fix the usage of
words, it is clear that the important real distinction is that
M
l63 THE WILL [bk.II
between the direction of the self-conscious self to the real-
isation of an object, its identification of itself with that
object, on the one side (whether that direction and identifi-
cation does or does not supervene upon a previous period
of indecision, is or is not accompanied by the consciousness
of attraction in an object other than that pursued), and, on
the other side, the mere solicitations of which a man is
conscious, but with none of which he so identifies himself
as to make the soliciting object his object — the object of
his self-seeking — or to direct himself to its realisation.
144. When it is urged, therefore, that the will often con-
flicts with and overcomes a man's desires — even if it be not
necessary in order to constitute a will, as sometimes seems
to be supposed, that there should be such a conflict with
desire — and that an act of will therefore must be other than
a desire, we answer, Certainly it is other than any such
desire as those which it is said to overcome. But it is not
other than desire iq that sense in which desire is ever the
principle or motive of an imputable human action, of an
action that has any moral quality, good or bad, that can
properly be rewarded or punished, or is fit matter for
praise or blame. It is not necessary to such an action that
there should be any overt effect, of which other men can
take note. Morally the action of a man who has made up
his mind to sacrifice himself for his friend or to commit
a murder is the same though he be accidentally disabled
before either the good resolution or the bad one, as the
case may be, has taken effect. The essential thing morally
is the man's direction of himself to the realisation of a con-
ceived or imagined object, whether circumstances allow of
its issuing in outward action, action that affects the senses
of other people, or no.
It would be a forced restriction of the term desire to
refuse to apply it to such direction of the self; but unless
we so restrict it, there is no ground for holding that will is
other than desire. The 'desire' which is motive to the
man who barters his heritage for a mess of pottage, differs
CH. It] DESIRE AND WILL 163
no doubt in its object from the 'will' of the man who
sacrifices his inclinations in adhering to a rule of abstinence
which he has imposed on himself ; but in the same respect
it differs from the ' desire ' or ' impulse ' of a man who swims
the Hellespont to see his mistress ; just as, again, the ' will '
described in the above instance differs in object from the
'will' of the man who, upon cool calculation, sacrifices
natural affection in order to get a better position in the world.
In each of these cases the principle of action is different in
respect of its object, but this is a difference to which, as we
see, the distinction in the usage of the terms ' desire ' and
' will ' does not correspond ; and, apart from the difference
of object, there is no difference between the principles of
action in the several cases. Where it is described as will it
is equally desire ; where it is described as desire or impulse
it is equally will. But whether described as desire or as
will, it is wholly different in its relation to the subject — to
the man willing or desiring — from such desires as are said
to compete for mastery in the man, or from any desire that
he retains when consciously acting in a way incompatible
with its gratification. It is an expression or utterance of
the man, as he for the time is. It begins from him, from
his self-conscious self. These other 'desires' end where it
begins, viz. in this self. They are influences or tendencies
by which the man, the self, is affected, not a motion
proceeding from him. They tend to move him, but he
does not move in them ; and none of them actually moves
him unless the man takes it into himself, identifies himself
with it, in a way which wholly alters it from what it was as
a mere influence affecting him.
145. The objection to saying that will is merely a strongest
desire is that, as it is apt to be understood, it leads to this
difference being ignored. It is taken to imply that the
principle of a man's action is no more than one of the in-
fluences to which the man in his inner life is susceptible —
that one which, under the conditions of the moment, or
upon consideration of the circumstances, becomes the
M 2
164 THE WILL [bk. ir
strongest. In truth it is never any or all of these, however
much it may be affected by them, but a self-distinguishing
and self-realising consciousness, through which, as a trans-
forming medium, these influences must pass before they
can take effect in a moral action at all. Just as each of us is
constantly having sensations which do not amount to percep-
tions, make no lodgment in the cosmos of our experience,
add nothing to our knowledge, because not gathered into
the focus of self-consciousness and through it referred to
objects or determined by relation to each other ; so there
are impulses constantly at work in a man — the result of
his organisation, of habits (his own or his ancestors'), of
external excitement, &c. — of which he is more or less aware
according to the degree to which their antagonism to each
other calls attention to them, but which yet do not amount
to principles of imputable action, or to desires of which it
is sought to realise the objects, because the self-seeking,
self-determining person has not identified himself with any
of them. It is such impulses alone that are properly said
to compete for mastery in a man before his determination
to act, and that may survive along with an enacted desire
that represents none of them. The 'strongest desire' or
will which is realised in act is not one of them nor co-
ordinate with them, though apart from them it would not
be. It is a new principle that supervenes upon them
through the self-conscious subject's identification of itself
with one of them, just as a perception is not a sensation or
congeries of sensations, but supervenes upon certain sensa-
tions through a man's attending to them, i. e. through his
taking them into self-consciousness and determining them,
as in it, by relation to others of its contents.
148. A man, we will suppose, is acted on at once by an
impulse to avenge an affront, by a bodily want, by a call of
duty, and by fear of certain results incidental to his avenging
the affront or obeying the call of duty. We will suppose
further that each passion (to use the most general term)
suggests a different line of action. So long as he is uti-
CH.ll] DESIRE AND WILL 165
decided how to act, all are, in a way, external to him. He
presents them to himself as influences by which he is
consciously affected but which are not he, and with none of
which he yet identifies himself; or, to vary the expression,
as tendencies to different objects, none of which is yet his
object. So long as this state of things continues, no moral
effect ensues. It ensues when the man's relation to these
influences is altered by his identifying himself with one of
them, by his taking the object of one of the tendencies
as for the time his good. This is to will, and is in itself
moral action, though circumstances may prevent its issuing
in that sensible effect which we call an overt act. But in
the act of will the man does not cease to desire. Rather he,
the man, for the first time desires, having not done so while
divided between the conflicting influences. His willing is not
a continuation of any of those desires, if they are to be so
called, that were previously acting upon him. It is that which
none of these had yet become ; a desire in which the man
enacts himself, as distinct from one which acts upon him.
Whether its object— the object to which the moral action is
directed — be the attainment of revenge, or the satisfaction
of a bodily want, or the fulfilment of a call of duty, it has
equally this characteristic. The object is one which for the
time the man identifies with himself, so that in being deter-
mined by it he is consciously determined by himself.
147. It is not necessary, however, to that putting forth of
the man or self in desire which constitutes an act of will,
that there should have been beforehand any conscious pre-
sentation of competing objects of desire, with consequent
deliberation as to which should be pursued. When a man
acts 'impulsively' or according to a settled habit, without
contemplating the possibility of a motive that might lead
him to another sort of action, it is still only through the
self-seeking and self-distinguishing self that the inducement,
or influence, or tendency, becomes a principle of action.
In such a case the man makes the object, which the passion
■or habit suggests, his own, and sets himself to realise it, just
l66 THE WILL [bk. II
as much as in the case where he contemplates alternatives.
The evidence of this is his self-imputation of the act upon
reflection. He may make excuses for it, should there be
occasion to do so, on the ground of the strength of the
inducement, but these very excuses witness that he is con-
scious of himself as other than the inducements and influ-
ences of which he pleads the strength, and conscious that it
is not from them, but from himself as affected by them, that
the action proceeds. When the case is otherwise, when he
is conscious of having really been but an instrument in doing
what he did, he does not make excuses but explains the fact.
So much for the opposition, sometimes alleged, between
will and desire. It must be admitted that an act of will is
never mere desire, never a desire which has been in conflict
with other co-ordinate desires and has come out the strongest,
if in speaking of such desire we suppose abstraction to be
made of the action of a self-determining self upon and within
it. But in this there lies no difference between will and any
other principle of moral or human or imputable, as distinct
from merely animal, action ; for mere desire, of that kind
to which will can properly be opposed, never amounts to
such a principle. The true distinction lies between passions
as influences affecting a man — among which we may include
'mere desires,' if we please — and the man as desiring, or
putting himself forth in desire for the realisation of some object
present to him in idea, which is the same thing as willing.
148. The recognised opposition between Will and Intellect
stands on a different footing. We have already pointed out
that, though a man in desiring (in the sense of consciously
directing himself to the realisation of objects) necessarily
exercises intellect, and in exercising intellect desires, yet
such desire and such speculative thought are differently
directed activities of the self-conscious subject. It is to be
remembered further that the understanding employed in
the exercise of desire relates to the desired object and to
the conditions of its realisation, while the desire involved in
CH. Il] INTELLECT AND WILL 167
a process of thinking has for its object the completion of
that process. It is therefore not to the purpose to insist on
the obvious fact that a man morally excellent, in the sense
that his desires are habitually directed to good practical
objects, may be ' stupid,' unskilled, and uninterested in the
exercise of intellect on all matters of literature, science, and
art, as well as lacking in power of expression upon the
matters in which he is interested ; or conversely, that a man
whose thoughts are habitually occupied, and occupied to
great effect, in the region of hterature, science, and art, may
be deficient in moral interests. From a certain point of
view, no doubt, this apparent discrepancy between moral
interests or objects, and those of the artist and the man of
science or letters, presents a serious difficulty. If we were
forming a theory of the universe, or trying to regard the
facts of human nature and history as the realisation of one
idea (and the effort thoroughly to understand them doubtless
implies such an attempt), then it would be a necessary
problem to show that these seemingly discrepant interests
and objects have some ultimate point of meeting. Our
present concern, however, is with the individual conscious-
ness and its objects— the objects of this or that man, as he
is actually conscious of them, not as they may be combined
with other objects in an idea which is not consciously his
though it may be operative in him.
For the consciousness of the individual the direction of
himself to such objects as, e.g., the settlement of a vexed
question in philology, or the perfect rendering of certain
atmospheric effects in landscape painting, has nothing in
common with the direction of himself to such objects as, e.g.^
the discipline of his own tongue, or the promotion of sobriety
among his neighbours. It is easy indeed to see that, even
within the experience and sphere of action of the individual,
interests of the one kind are not without a bearing — at any
rate in the result — on interests of the other kind. The effect
of 'moral' interests appears in habits without which the
scholar or artist is not properly free for his work, nor exempt
l68 THE WILL [bk. II
from the temptation to be showy instead of thorough in it.
Conversely, the effect of scientific and artistic interests may
be to neutralise to some extent the attractions which com-
pete most actively with reverence for moral law and devotion
to the service of men. There is also such a thing as a con-
sciousness of the ultimate unity of all pursuits that contribute
to the perfection of man, which may import a certain enthu-
siasm of humanity into the devotion with which the scholar
or artist applies himself to his immediate object, and which
may keep the practical mind open to interests in literature
and art. Still the immediate difference, for the conscious-
ness of the individual, between the kinds of object distin-
tinguished is such that the employment of thought upon
objects of a non-practical kind, though it necessarily carries
with it a direction of desire to the realisation of the intel-
lectual ideal, may very well go along with an absence of
desire for the realisation of any moral ideal ; while, on the
other hand, the direction of desire to the latter object, though
it necessarily implies an exercise of intellect in the concep-
tion of the moral object and of the conditions of its attain-
ment, may very well go along with a want of inclination to
think, and of ability to think well, about other things.
149. It is clear then that a particular act of will does not,
on the part of the person willing, involve thought except
about the object of the act of will— such thought as is
implied in the conception of self, of an object present to the
self in idea as desired, of a world in which that object awaits
realisation, of conditions under which it is to be realised.
Now when we oppose thinking and willing, we may have
in view the distinction between the speculative and the
practical employment of the human spirit, the distinction
between its work as directed to that discovery of relations
between existing things which enables it to regard them as
one, and its work as bringing conceived or imagined objects
into real existence. This is a valid distinction, though it
must be borne in mind, as previously pointed out, that the
speculative employment is necessarily accompanied by willing
CH. Il] INTELLECT AND WILL 169
— for we only find unity in the world because we have an
idea that it is there, an idea which we direct our powers to
realise — and that throughout any practical process ideas
operate and are operated upon (to use the most general
expression) in a manner which we should describe as thought,
if the term had not come to be specially associated with the
speculative exercise of thought. But if this is the distinction
that we have in view when we oppose thinking and willing,
it is improper to say that mere thinking is not willing, or that
willing is more than thinking. Speculation and moral action
are co-ordinate employments of the same self-conscious soul,
and of the same powers of that soul, only differently directed.
Speculative thinking is not an element of moral action,
requiring the addition of something else to constitute moral
action. But when we say that mere thinking is not willing,
we imply that the thinking of which we speak does stand in
this relation to moral action — that some complementary
element needs to be added to it in order to constitute moral
action. And of the speculative exercise of thought this is
not true.
150. If then the proposition in question is to be to the
purpose at all, it must relate to such thinking as is involved
in or presupposed by an act of will. If we say, e.g., that
the act of willing to pay a debt is more than mere thinking,
what we wish to point out is certainly not that thinking
about a mathematical theorem is not equivalent to willing
to pay the debt. We probably mean to say that the mere
thinking about paying the debt falls short of willing to pay
it. But here our rejoinder will be that this depends on
what we mean by the thinking. If thinking about payment
of the debt means merely an otiose contemplation of a
possible event, the proposition may be true but is little
to the purpose. Such thought does not amount to either
of those activities of the thinking self which have been
described above. Just as sensuous impressions are con-
stantly occurring to us which tell us nothing, suggest
nothing, because they do not fit into any context of ideas.
170 THE WILL [bk. II
SO ideas are constantly, as we say, passing through our
minds without forming part of any process of thought
speculative or practical, as defined by reference to an end.
The possibility of paying his debts may thus pass through
the mind of the debtor without really amounting to an
object of thought at all, either in the sense in which a fact
that I am trying to understand, or that I am applying to
other facts in order to understand them, is an object of
thought, or in the sense in which an understanding that
interests me is so. At any rate the object thought of in
such thinking, such otiose contemplation, is not the object
willed in the will to pay the debt. The object thought of
is a possible occurrence — an object of speculative thought,
if of thought at all. The man presents to himself the pay-
ment of his debt as an event that may happen, with its
various incidents. But it is not such a possible event that
a man wills in willing to pay the debt. To will an event,
as distinguished from an act, is a contradiction. The object
willed is the realisation of an idea — an idea of relief from
annoyance, of satisfying one's neighbours' expectations, of
what self-respect requires, or of a good in which all these
ends are included.
151. Thus, though such an object of thought as the
possible event of the debt being paid is not the object
willed, the object willed is yet an object of thought. There
is always thinking in willing. A thoughtless will would be
no will. Without the thought of self and a world as
mutually determined, of an object present to the self in
a desire felt by it, but awaiting realisation in the world,
there would be no will but only blind impulse. Even in
cases where the will is said to be governed by animal
appetite, it is still the realisation of an idea that is the
object willed. The pleasure incidental to the gratification
of the appetite exists ideally or in anticipation for me, and
what I will is the realisation of this idea. Otherwise it
would be no longer / that did the act, but an appetite
dwelling in me. The act would not be mine ; I should not
CH. IlJ INTELLECT AND WILL 171
impute it to myself, any more than, e.g., an operation which
I find the animal system has performed while I have been
asleep. But if in all cases of willing the -object willed is
the realisation of an idea, the object of will is also an
object of thought. It is only for a subject which thinks,
and so far as thinking, that it can exist.
The question accordingly arises whether thinking, of the
kind which is thus essential to willing, can properly be
regarded as merely depart of, or an element in, willing, to
which something must be added in order to constitute an
act of will. Unless this is so, the proposition that viere
thinking is not willing, that willing is more than thinking,
conveys a false impression. And it would seem not to be
so. The act of willing is not in part one of thinking. It is
an act of thought, though not of thought speculatively
directed, wholly and throughout. There is no factor or
element in it separable (except verbally) from thought, and
of which the addition to thought makes up the whole called
an act of will. Is it not, we may perhaps ask, the addition
of desire to thought that constitutes will ? But the answer
must be. No, will is not thought //«« desire. Desire of the
kind which enters into willing involves thought ; thought of
the kind which enters into willing involves desire ; for the
desire is the direction of a self-conscious subject to the
realisation of an idea, while the thought is the presence of
an idea in such a subject impelling to its own realisation.
We cannot say that the thought is separate from the desire
and supervenes upon it, or that the desire is so related to
the thought.
152, The notion of their being separate elements which
together make up an act of will arises from thought and
desire being severally supposed to be something which, as
in will, they are not. We have already seen that when, on
the one hand, different desires are said to compete for
mastery in a man, or when it is said that one object is
desired but another willed, and when, on the other hand,
a moral action is said to proceed from or represent some
172 THE WILL [bk. II
desire, 'desire' is being used in different senses. In one
sense it means desire as it affects a man, in the other the
desire which proceeds from a man or in which he expresses
himself. Desire of the one sort ends where the other
begins, viz. in the direction of the man's self to an object.
In the one case he does, in the other he does not, put
himself forth to the realisation of the desired object, as one
in the realisation of which he seeks self-satisfaction. In
like manner our thoughts may mean either thoughts that,
as we say, occur to us, or thoughts to the realisation of
which we direct ourselves. It is thought only in the latter
of the two senses distinguished, desire likewise in the latter
of its two senses, that enters into willing.
No doubt, both thought in the other sense and desire in
the other sense are presupposed by willing, as conditions
antecedent ; and in the sense in which they are severally
conditions antecedent of the act of willing but do not enter
into it, they are clearly separable. There may very well be
one without the other. I may, e.g., contemplate payment
of a debt as a possible event, consider how much money
would be required for the purpose, how the creditor would
behave when he got his money, and so on, without being
affected by any desire to pay; and conversely I may feel
that I should be more at ease if I paid, without my thoughts
running further on the event. But in the sense in which
thought and desire enter into an act of will, each is the
whole act ; and we can only distinguish them by describing
one and the same act of the inner man, which thought and
desire equally constitute, as in respect of desire the direction
of a self-conscious subject to the realisation of an idea, in
respect of thought the action of an idea in such a subject
impelling to its realisation.
153. Will then is equally and indistinguishably desire and
thought — not however mere desire or mere thought, if by that
is meant desire or thought as they might exist in a being
that was not self-distinguishing and self-seeking, or as they
may occur to a man independently of any action of himself;
CH. Il] INTELLECT AND WILL 173
but desire and thought as they are involved in the direction
of a self-distinguishing and self-seeking subject to the realis-
ation of an idea '. If so, it must be a mistake to regard the
will as a faculty which a man possesses along with other
faculties — those of desire, emotion, thought, &c. — and which
has the singular privilege of acting independently of other facul-
ties, so that, given a man's character as it at any time results
from the direction taken by those other faculties, the will
remains something apart which may issue in action different
from that prompted by the character. The will is simply
the man. Any act of will is the expression of the man as he
at the time is. The motive issuing in his act, the object of
his will, the idea which for the time he sets himself to realise,
are but the same thing in different words. Each is the reflex
of what for the time, as at once feeling, desiring, and think-
ing, the man is. In willing he carries with him, so to speak,
his whole self to the realisation of the given idea. All the
time that he so wills, he may feel the pangs of conscience,
or (on the other hand) the annoyance, the sacrifice, implied
in acting conscientiously. He may think that he is doing
wrong, or that it is doubtful whether after all there is really
an objection to his acting as he has resolved to do. He may
desire some one's good opinion which he is throwing away,
or some pleasure which he is sacrificing. But for all that it
is only the feeling, thought, and desire represented by the
act of will, that the man recognises as for the time himself.
The feeling, thought, and desire with which the act conflicts
are influences that he is aware of, influences to which he is
susceptible, but they are not he.
' It may prevent possible misapprehension, if I say tliat the term
idea is here and in all similar passages used in the wide sense gene-
rally attached to it by English writers, who have followed the
definition of it by Locke as ' the immediate object of the mind in
thinking.' In this sense it seems pretty much equivalent to the
German ' Vorstellung.'
BOOK III
THE MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS
CHAPTER I
GOOD AND MORAL GOOD
154. We are now in a position to return to the difficulty
which was raised at the beginning of the last chapter, and
which led to our attempt to ascertain the nature of Will, in
its relation to desire and thought. That difficulty was as
to the ground of distinction between the good and the bad
will; a distinction which in some form or other — whether
we consider the goodness of a will to be an attribute which
it possesses on its own account, or to be relative to some
result to which it contributes beyond the will itself — must
lie at the root of every system of Ethics. What becomes
of this distinction, we supposed an objector to ask, if the
doctrine previously stated is admitted, ' that in all conduct
to which moral predicates are applicable a man is an object
to himself; that such conduct, equally whether virtuous or
vicious, expresses a motive consisting in an idea of personal
good which the man seeks to realise by action' (§ 115)?
Further consideration has confirmed this statement. If it
is a genuine definition that we want of what is common to
all acts of willing, we must say that such an act is one in
which a self-conscious individual directs himself to the
realisation of some idea, as to an object in which for the
time he seeks self-satisfaction. Such being an act of willing,
the will in actuality must he the self-conscious individual as
so directing himself, while the will in possibility, or as a
faculty, will be the self-conscious individual as capable of
so directing himself.
The above, however, is merely z. formal account of willing
and the will. It does not tell us the real nature of any act
GOOD AND MORAL GOOD 175
of will, or of any man as willing,' or of any national will —
if there be such a thing as one will operating in or upon the
several members of a nation — or of the human will, if again
there be such a thing as one will operating throughout the
history of mankind. For the real nature of any act of will
depends on the particular nature of the object in which the
person willing for the time seeks self-satisfaction ; and the
real nature of any man as the subject of will — his character
— depends on the nature at the .objectsJn which he mainly
^en^to seek self-satisfaction. Self^atisfacti©a-4s- the-forni„
of every object willed; but the filling of that^form, the
character of that in which self-satisfaction is/sought, ranging
from sensual pleasure to the fulfilment o/a vocation con-
ceived as given by God, makes the^gbjg&LaLhat,itj;eallyjs.
It is on the specific difference of the objects willed under the
general form of self-satisfaction that the quality of the will
must depend. It is here therefore that we must seek for the
basis of distinction between goodness and badness of will.
155. The statement that the distinction between the good
and bad will must lie at the basis of any system of Ethics,
and the further statement that this distinction itself must
depend on the nature of the objects willed, would in some
sense or other be accepted by all recognised^ ' schools ' of
moralists, but they would be accepted in_ very different
senses. On the one side the modern yuljtgBan would only
accept the former statement in the sense that, unless an
action is done JMtentionally, it is not the subject of moral
predicates. The action, in his view, derives its moral quality
not from the rnotiye or character which it expresses, -but
from the effects which jt^ produces. Those effects, indeed,
do not entitle the act to be reckoned morally good or bad,'
unless it is one which the agent intends or wills to do ; but,
given the intentional act, it is not on the motive which leads
to its being intended, but on its effects in the way of pleasure
or pain, that its morality depends. This is very plainly put
by J. S. Mill : 'The morality of the action depends entirely
upon the intention — that is, upon what the agent wills to do.
176 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
But the motive, that is, the feeling which makes him will so
to do, when it makes no difference in the act, makes none
in the morality : though it makes a great difference in our
moral estimation of the agent, especially if it indicates a
good or a bad habitual disposition — a bent of character from
which useful or from which hurtful actions are likely to
arise '.' In other words, while there are two distinct objects
of moral approbation or disapprobation, or two objects
which admit of the designation morally good or bad, {a)
intentional action, {b) the motive or character of an agent,
the latter is only to be judged relatively to the former, just
as the former is only to be judged relatively to its effects as
producing pleasure or pain. The motive_or character. is
morally good, Jf likely on the whole to issiie in intgational
actions which are good in the jengfi„ot,producing on the
whole, one person filceh with another and one time with
another, an excess^o/jgleasure over pain.
Clearly, upon this view, our statement that Ethics is
founded on the distinction between the good and bad will
could only be accepted under the proviso that by good and
bad will is understood good and bad intentional action, and
further that intentional action is understood to be good or
bad according to its relation to an ultimate good and evil,
which are constituted not by any kind of action, intention,
or character, but by pleasure and pain. The other statement
that ' the distinction between the good and bad will must
depend on the nature of the objects willed ' would be sub-
jected by the Utilitarian to a similar qualification. He could
accept it if by ' will ' is understood intention, and if by ' the
objects willed ' are understood the effects of the intentional
act in the way of producing pleasure and pain. If by ' will '
is meant ' habitual disposition,' and by ' objects willed ' mo-
tives, he could only accept the statement on the understanding
that the 'nature of the objects willed' is itself taken to depend
on the tendency of the motives to issue in actions productive
of a preponderance of pleasure or pain as the case may be.
' Utilitarianism, p. 27, note.
CH. l] GOOD AND MORAL GOOD 177
It is in a precisely opposite sense^ that the propositions
in question would have to be understood, in order to be
approved by a strict followjrof_Kant, With him an act
of will would never be understood merely of an intention
to do a certain deed, in abstraction from the motive or
object for the sake of which the deed is done ; and with
him again the good will is^gopd, not in virtue of any effects
extrinsic to it, but in virtue of what it. is in itself,- not as
a means, but as an absolute end. The first of the above
stateiftents, therefore, he would accept in the sense which
it naturally bears. In the second he might see a loophole
for error. To say that a will is good in virtue of the nature
of the objects willed, does not exclude the notion that it
may be good in virtue of desired effects other than its own
goodness, or as directed to objects which are willed other-
wise than for the reason of their being prescribed by a
universal practical law. So far as the statement in ques-
tion is understood according to any such notion as this,
Kant — at any rate if interpreted according to the reiterated
letter of his doctrine — would reckon it fundamentally erro-
neous.
166. It is not according to the plan of the present treatise
to examine critically either the moral doctrine of Kant as
stated by himself, or that of Utilitarianism as stated by
leading authorities, until it has been attempted to give the
outline of a positive doctrine in regard to the nature of
goodness and of our moral progress'. This done, the
criticism may be undertaken with less liability to its drift
being misunderstood, and without conveying the impression
that no truth is thought to remain where some error has
been detected. What then ar,e,the guestions-naturally raised
for us by the considerations which we have so far pursued,
and which a positive ethicaL^octrine should Jiieginjby^-
tempting to answer^? The first of them may perhaps be
statenSui; Granted that, according to our doctrine, in
all willing a self-conscious subject seeks to satisfy itself —
' [See Preface].
N
178 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. Ill
seeks that which for the time it presents to itself as its
good — how can there Jbe an^such intrinsic difference be-
tween the'"oBJects willed as justifies the distinc^i_on_which
'morarsehse'^^seems to draw between good and bad action,
between virtue and vice ? And if there is such a difference,
in what does it consist ?
A possible answer to the question would of course be
a denial that _there is any such--difier£ace at all. By an
intrinsic difference between the objects willed we mean
a difference between them in respect of that which is the
motive to the person willing them, as distinct from a differ-
ence constituted by any effects which the realisation of the
objects may bring about, but of which the anticipation does
not form the motive. Now according to all strictly Hedon-
istic theories the difference between objects willed is, ac-
cording tothis sense of the terms, extrinsic,^nQtJntrinsie^
The motive to the persons willing is supposed to be in all
cases the^^jame, viz. 4esire^Jor_som£ pleasure or aversion
from some pain. The conditions of the pleasures which
different men desire, or which the same man desires at
different times, are of course most various ; but it is not
the conditions of any pleasure but the pleasure iitself that
a man desires, if pleasure is really his object at a^. On the
Hedonistic supposition, therefore, every object wj.lled.. is on
its inner side, or in'respect of that which moves the person
willing, the same. It moves him as anticipated pleasure,
or anticipated escape from pain. The jlifference between
objects willed lies on their outer side, iia effects whirh fnllnw
from them but are^not included .ija,th£ni.as motives to the
perions wiUmgT Two objects having been equally willed as
so much anticipated pleasure, the realisation of the one does
in the event produce a preponderance of pleasure over pain
to the agent himself or to others, while the realisation of the
other produces a preponderance of pain over pleasure. Thus
and thus only, according to this theory — extrinsically not
intrinsically — is the difference constituted between a good
object of will and a bad one.
CH. ij GOOD AND MORAL GOOD 179
157. A detailed criticism of this doctrine would be out
of place till we come to the examination of Utilitarianism.
If the amoii ToC -^evhois can be explained, it will not stand
seriously in our way ; for though excellent men have argued
themselves into it, it is a doctrine which, nakedly put, of-
fends the unsophisticated conscience. Whatever the pro-
cess may have been, we have reached a state in which we
seem to knowthat the desires wejhink well of in ourselves
differ absolutely as desires, or in respect of the objects de-
sired in them, from those which we despise or condemn.
If asked straight out to admit that all objects of desire, as
desired, are alike, since it is pleasure that is equally the
desired thing in them all ; that it is only in the effects of
the actions arising out of them, not in what they are for the
desiring consciousness, that good desires differ from bad
ones ; upon first thoughts we should certainly refuse to do
so. Hesitation would only ensue if the enlightened en-
quirer asked us to reflect, whether we ever find ourselves
desiring any thing from which we do not anticipate pleasure
of some sort, and whether it is not this anticipation that
makes us desire it. Thus challenged, we feel ourselves in
a difficulty. This, a&couatjoLdesireiiasLajjLausibility which
we do not at once seepur way to explaining. Yet to accept ,
it seems to involve us logically ' in an admission of_the m- ,
trinacidentity of alljdesirg, good and bad, which offends ^
our mo^ conviction. If we "could expfain away the appar-
ent cogency of the plea that it is some anticipated pleasure,
as such, which we always find ourselves desiring, the con-
viction of the difference between good and bad desires, as
states of consciousness on the part of the persons desiring,
would hold its own undisturbed.
158. Now, according to the account previously given of
desire, it is not difficult to explain the confusion which
' The attempt to combine the doctrine that pleasure as such is the
sole object of desire, with the assertion of an intrinsic diflferente be-
tween good and bad desires, on the ground that pleasures differ in
quality, will be considered below.
N 2
l8o MORAL WEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
makes pleasure seem to be its only object. We saw that,
in all such desire as can form the motive to an imputable
act, "flielnSI^ual .direcJts._himself to the realisation of some
idea, as to an object in which he seeks jelTsatisfaction. It
is the consciousness_that_ self-satisfaction is thus sought in
all enacted desire, in all desire that amount¥ to will, com-
bined with the consciousness Jhatip all self-satisfaction, if
attained, there is pleasure, which leads to the false notion
that pleasure' is always the object of Besire, Whether in
any case it really is so, or no, depends on whether pleasure
' is the object with which a man is seeking to satisj^ hirnself.
if it is not, pleasure is not the object of his dominant desire.
However much pleasure there may prove to be in the self-
satisfaction, if any, which the attainment of his object brings
with it — and our common experience is that the objects with
which we seek to satisfy ourselves do not turn out capable
of satisfying us — it cannot be this pleasure that is the object
which he desires. Its possibility presupposes the desire and
its fulfilment. It cannot therefore be the exciting cause of
the desire, any more than the pleasure of satisfying hunger
can be the exciting cause of hunger. Only if the idea which
in his desire the man seeks_to_ realise is the idea of enjoying
some pleasure — whether a pleasure of the kind which we
commonly call sensual in a special sense, i. e. one incidental
to the satisfaction of animal appetite, or a pleasure of pure
emotion — can we truly say that pleasure is the object of his
desire.
159. When the idea of which the realisation is sought is
not that of enjoying any pleasure, thejact^ that self-satisfac-
tion is sought in thejeffort^to realise the idea of the desired
object does not .make, pleasure the object of the desire,_ It
may very well be that a man pursues an object in which
he seeks self-satisfaction with the clear consGiousness-ihat
no enjoyment of _pleasure can yield him satisfaction, and
thafthere must be such pain jn the, realisation of the idea
to which he devoted himself ^cannot ,b£.coi!ngensatedjJn
any scale where pleasure and pain alone are weighed, by any
CH. l] PLEASURE AND DESIRE l8l
enjoyment of an end achieved '. So it is in the more heroic
forms of selFsacrilice. SeKatisfaction is doubtless sought
in such sacrifice. The man who calmly faces a life of suffer-
ing in the fulfilment of what he conceives to be his mission
could not bear to do otherwise. So to live is his good.
If he could attain the consciousness of having accomplished
his work, if he could 'count himself to have apprehended'
— and probably just in proportion to the elevation of his
character he is unable to do so — he would findsatisfaction
in_yie j:onsciousness, and_^ith it ascertain pleasure. But
supposing this pleasure to be attained, QnlyJhfi_exigenciea of
a theory could suggest^ the notion that^as so much pleasure,
ifjnakes up for the pleasures forgone and Jhe pains endured
in the life through which it has been reached. Such a
notion can only be founded on the see-saw process which
first assumes that preference in every case is determined by
amount of anticipated pleasure, and then professes to ascertain
the relative amount of pleasure which a given line of action
affords a man by the fact that he prefers so to act.
160. Even if it were the case, however, that self-satisfac-
tion was more attainable than it is, and that the pleasure of
success to the man who has ' spurned delights and lived
laborious days ' really admitted of being set against the
pleasure missed in the process, it would none the less be
a mere confusion to treatjhis^ pleasure of success as the
desired object, in the realisation of which the man seeks
to satisfy himself. A man may seek to satisfy himself with
pleasure, but the pleasure of self-satisfaction can never be
that with which he seeks to satisfy himself. This is equally
true of the voluptuary and of the saint. The voluptuary
must have his ideas of pleasures, unconnected with self-
satisfaction, before he can seek self-satisfaction (where it is
not to be found) in the realisation of those ideas ; just as
^ Cf. Arist. Eth. Nic. III. ix. 5. Ov S^ iv aitaaais Tofs apirais to
^Se(u; kvepyfTv vn&pxct, ttA^v €^' Saov rov TeKov3 etfMiTTeTat, *Thus the
rule that the exercise of virtue is pleasant does not hold of all the virtues,
except in so far as the end is attained. '
l82 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. m
much as the saint must have ideas, not of pleasures but
of services due to God and man, before he can seek self-
satisfaction in their fulfilment. Most men, however, at
least in their ordinary conduct, are neither voluptuaries nor
saints ; and we are falling into a false antithesis if, having
admitted (as is true) that the quest of self-satisfaction is the
form of all moral activity, we allow no alternative (as Kant
in effect seems to allow none) between the quest for self-
satisfaction in the enjoyment of pleasure, and the quest for
it in the fulfilment of a universal practical law. Ordinary
motives fall neither under the one head nor the other.
They are interests in the, attainmenl.jQl._objects, wjthqut
which it seems to the man in his actual state thathejcannot
satisfy himself, and in attaining which, Jbgeanse he^ has
desired themj^he will find a certain pleasure, Jbut only be-
cause^he has^eyipusly^desicedibem, not berause pleasures
^re the objects _desired.
iei. Such interests, though not mere appetites because
conditioned by self-consciousness, correspond to them as
not having pleasure for their object. This point was
sufficiently made out in the controversy as to the ' disinter-
estedness ' of benevolence, carried on during the first part of
the eighteenth century. When philosophers of the ' selfish
school' represented benevolence as ultimately desire for
some pleasure to oneself, Butler and others met them by
showing that this was the same mistake as to reckon hunger
a desire for the pleasure of eating. The appetite of hunger
must precede^and jomiition the pleasure]ffiHlcE~consists_.ih
jt s . _s a t j sfac tion . It cannot therefore have that pleasure for
its exciting object. ' It terminates upon its object,' and is
not relative fo anything beyond the taking of food; and in
the same way benevolent desires terminate upon their objects,
upon the benefits done to others. In the 'termination' in
each case there is pleasure, but it is a confusion to represent
this as an object beyond the obtaining of food or the doing
a kindness, to which the appetite or benevolent desire is
really directed. What is true of benevolence is true of
CH. l] PLEASURE AND DESIRE 183
motives which we oppose to it, as the vicious to the virtuous,
e.g. of jealousy or the desire for revenge. lago^ does not
workjpsaLjQlhelLQ .fior_the_.§a)ce_ oL aiiy_gleasure Jhat^ he
e2gects_to_ex2erience when hjs^e^^ because
in his envious state an object of which the reaUsation seems
necessary to the satisfaction of himself is Othello's ruin, just
as the consumption of food is necessary to the satisfaction
of hunger. WjiatJxe_desires__is_to.^fie.-QtJieJ]5_dflvi^
tlje_£leasure.he .wilLieeL when he sees him^— a pleasure
which he could not feel unless he had desired the object
independently of such anticipation.
It is true that any interest or desire for an object may
come to be reinforced by desire for the ^ pleasure-YducE,
reflecting upon past analogous experience, the subject of
the intereiEHay expect as incidental -toJta..5ati5fecliQn. In
this way ' cool self-love,' according to the terminology of the
last century, may combine with 'particular desires or pro-
pensions.' If there is to be any chance, however, of the
expected pleasure being really enjoyed, the 'self-love' of
which pleasure is the object roust not supersede the ' par-
ticular propension ' of which pleasure, in the case of ordinary
healthy interests, is not the object. The pleasure incidental
to the satisfaction of an interest cannot be attained after
loss of the interest itself, nor can the interest be revived by
wishing for a renewal of the pleasure incidental to its satis-
faction. Hence just so far as 'cool self-love^JJnJJie-sense
ola^calculating^pursuit of pleasure, becomes dominant and
supersedes particular interesfs^ the chanceFof .Measure are
really lostj which accounts for the restlessness of the
pleasure-seeker, and for the common remark that the right
way to get pleasure is not to seek it.
162. It may seem presumptuous to charge clear-headed
moralists with the mistake of supposing that a desire can
be excited by the anticipation of its own satisfaction. But
such a mistake certainly seems to be accountable for the
acceptance of the doctrine that pleasure is the sole object
of desire by so powerful a writer as J. S. Mill. He, as is
184 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
well known, differs from the older Utilitarians in holding
that, although pleasure and freedom from pain are the only
things desirable as ends, some kinds of pleasurejje^more.
d^kahle andjaluablejhan others, not as involving a greater
amount of pleasure, but |n_thgir intrinsic nature*. Every
one must feel that the Utilitarian theory receives a certain
exaltation from his treatment of it, and especially from his
assertion of this point. But the question is, whether the
admissions which he has to make in order to establish it do
not virtually amount to a departure from the doctrine that
pleasure or freedom from pain is the only object of desire ;
a departure which he only disguises from himself and his
reader by virtually assuming that a desire may have for its
object the pleasure, or deliverance from pain, involved in
its satisfaction. It will be useful to dwell a little longer on
this question, not for the sake of picking holes in a writer
from whom we have all learnt much, but in order to bring
out more clearly the distinction between the quest for self-
satisfaction which all moral activity is rightly held to be, and
the quest for pleasure which morally '^oo(f activity is not.
163. No one of course can doubt that pleasures admit of
distinction in quality according to the conditions Under
which they arise. So Plato and Aristotle distinguished
pleasures incidental to the satisfaction of bodily wants from
pleasures of sight and hearing, and these again from the
pleasures of pure intellect. So too we might distinguish
pleasures of satisfied desire from pleasures of pure emotion,
and subdivide each sort according to the various conditions
under which desire or emotion is excited. No one pretends
that the pleasures of a sot are not really different from those
of a man of refined taste. The question is in what sense,
upon the principle that pleasure is the ultimate good by
relation to which all other good is to be tested, these differ-
ences of kind between pleasures may be taken to constitute
any difference in the degree of their goodness or desirability.
All Utilitarians would hold that on one ground or another
1 Utilitarianism, pp. 10-12.
CH. l] PLEASURE AND DESIRE 185
they might be so taken, but they would not all agree upon
the ground. The strict Benthamites hold that such differ-
ences of kind between pleasures as arise from differences in
their exciting causes only affect their value or the degree of
their goodness, in so far as they affect the amount of plea-
sure enjoyed on the whole; while Mill holds that these
differences affect the value of pleasures independently of the
effect they have on their amount. The estimation of plea-
sures should not depend on quantity alone : quality is to be
considered as well as quantity ^-
164. For an explanation and defence of this variation
from the doctrine of his master, Mill appeals to the 'un-
questionable fact that those who are equally acquainted with
and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying, both, do
give a most marked preference to the manner of existence
which employs their higher faculties,' as compared with one
involving more sensual pleasures. They do this, ' even
though knowing it to be attended with a greater amount of
discontent.' We naturally accept such an appeal because
we cannot help thinking of the man whose preference Mill
describes, as better in himself th&n one more 'sensual,' and
of the ' higher faculties ' as intrinsically of more value ; in
other words, because we regard the attainment of a certain
type of character or some realisation of the possibilities of
man, not pleasure, as the end by relation to which goodness
or value is to be measured. But, on the principle that plea-
sure is the only thing good ultimately or in its own right,
we are not justified in so doing. On this principle one man
can be better, one faculty higher than another, only as a
more serviceable instrument for the production of pleasure.
On this ground it is open to the Utilitarian to argue that a
man who devotes himself to the exercise of such ' higher
faculties' as Mill is here thinking of, produces a greater
amount of pleasure on the whole, all circumstances affecting
that amount being taken into account, than does the man
who does not trouble himself about his ' higher faculties.'
' Utilitarianism, pp. 10-12.
l86 MOHAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. ill
■ But it is altogether against Utilitarian principles that a plea-
sure should be of more value because the man who pursues
it is better. \/ They only entitle us to argue back from the
amount of pleasure to the worth of the man who acts so as
to produce it.
If we rid ourselves then of all presuppositions, illegitimate
on Utilitarian principles, in regard to the superiority of the
man or the faculties exercised in what we call the highest
pursuits, and if we admit that all desire is for pleasure, the
strongest desire for the greatest pleasure, what is proved by
the example of the man who, being 'competently acquainted
with both,' prefers the life of moral and intellectual effort
to one of healthy animal enjoyment ? Simply this, that the
life of effort brings more pleasure to the man in question
than he would derive from the other sort of life. It out-
weighs for him any quantity of other pleasure of which his
nature is capable. The fact that he is ' competently acquaint-
ed with both ' sorts of pleasure can give no significance be-
yond this to his preference of one above the other. He may
be 'competently acquainted' with animal enjoyments; but
it does not follow that the pleasure they afford him is as
intense and unmixed as that which they afford to the man
who makes them his principal pursuit. The question of
value then between the two sorts will have to be settled by
a calculation of amount, the intensity of each kind, as ex-
perienced by those to whom it is most intense, being weighed
against its duration and its degree of purity, productiveness,
and extent'. The calculation is certainly very hard to make
— whether it can be made at all is a question to be touched
on when we come to a more detailed examination of Utili-
tarianism * — but it is the only possible way, if pleasure is the
sole and ultimate good, of measuring the comparative worth
of pleasures. The example of a certain man's preference,
unless we have some other standard of his excellence than
' Cf. Dumont's version of the Principles of Morals and Legislation
(Hildretli's translation), p. 31.
'' [See Book IV. chap, iii.]
CH. l] PLEASURE AND DESIRE 187
such as is relative to pleasure as the ultimate good, proves
nothing as to the superiority of the pleasure which he
chooses to another sort of pleasure preferred by some one
else. It only proves that it is more of a pleasure to him
than is that to which he prefers it ; and this it only proves on
supposition that the stronger desire is always for the greater
pleasure.
165. Now it will be found, we think, that with Mill this
supposition really rests on a confusion between the pleasure
or removal of pain which ensues upon the satisfaction of
any desire and the object of that desire. In an eloquent
passage he illustrates the unwillingness of any one acquainted
with the ' higher ' pleasures to exchange them for any quan-
tity of the lower : —
' Now it is an unquestionable fact that those who are equally ac-
quainted with, and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying, both,
do give a most marked preference to the manner of existence which
employs their higher faculties. Few human creatures would consent to
be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of ihe fullest
allowance of a beast's pleasures ; no intelligent human being would con-
sent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person
of feeling and conscience would consent to be selfish and base, even
though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal
is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs. They would
not resign what they possess more than he, for the most complete satis-
faction of all the desires which they have in common with him. If they
ever fancy they would, it is only in cases of unhappi ness so extreme, that
to escape from it they would exchange their lot for almost any other,
however undesirable in their own eyes. A being of high faculties
requires more to make him happy, is capable probably of more acute
suffering, and is certainly accessible to it at more points, than one of an
inferior type ; but in spite of these liabilities, he can never really wish to
sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence. We may give
what explanation we please of this unwillingness ; we may attribute it
to pride, a name which is given indiscriminately to some of the most and
to some of the least estimable feelings of which mankind are capable;
we may refer it to the love of liberty and personal independence, an
appeal to which was with the Stoics one of the most effectual means for
the inculcation of it ; to the love of power, or to the love of excitement,
both of which do really enter into and contribute to it : but its most
appropriate appellation is a sense of dignity, which all human beings
possess in one form or other, and in some, though by no means in exact,
I88 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. Ill
proportion to their higher faculties ; and which is so essential a part of
the happiness of those in whom it is strong, that nothing which conflicts
with it could be, otherwise than momentarily, an object of desire to
them'.'
It appears from this passage that there is a motive, which
has been variously described as ' pride,' ' love of liberty,'
' love of power,' ' love of excitement,' but of which the most
appropriate designation is ' sense of dignity,' that makes a
man of a certain sort refuse to accept any amount of such
pleasure as a fool, or a dunce, or a rascal might share, in lieu
of the exercise of the higher faculties, however much suffer-
ing this may entail, ^his refusal is appealed to as showing
that the pleasure attending this exercise is intrinsically pre-
ferable to such as may be shared with a dunce or a rascaL]
That it is intrinsically preferable those who are not Utili-
tarians will readily agree. But unless it is a greater pleasure
on the whole, it is not on Utilitarian principles more really
desirable or the greater good, and the fact that by the sort
of person in contemplation it is preferred does^ not show
that it is even for him, much less that it is on the whole,
the greater pleasure, unless his preference is necessarily for;^.
what is to him the greater pleasure. ';■',.'; ^^ ^ \^a^,.^ ' ^ , i^'-.j V
166. But with what plausibility can the motive described
as a sense of dignity be reckoned a desire for pleasure at
all? Mill indeed calls it 'an essential part of the happiness
of those in whom it is strong ' ; but no desire as such, since
it must rather be painful than pleasant, can properly be called ,
a 'part of happiness.' It may be suggested therefore that by
the 'sense of dignity' spoken of Mill understands an emotion,
as distinct from desire, which he would no doubt be justified
in calling a part of happiness, an ingredient in the sum of a
man's pleasures. In that case we must suppose that it is
desire foLthe^asure of this einotion which makes the man,
who is capable of the pleasiire attending the exercise of the
higher faculties, prefer this to the pleasure which he might
share with the dunce. If this indeed were the true account
' Utilitarianism, pp. 12-13.
CH. l] PLEASURE AND DESIRE 189
of the matter, the strict Benthamite who will recognise no
distinction in quality as distinct from quantity of pleasure,
might say that it was simply a case of the pleasure preferred
being more 'productive.' The intellectual pleasure brings
the additional pleasure, consisting in the emotion called
sense of dignity, which the animal pleasure does not. It is
scarcely however a plausible account of the motive which
makes an intelligent person unwilling to be a fool, a person
of feeling and conscience unwilling to be selfish or base,
though persuaded that the change would save him much
discontent, to say that it is desire for the preponderating
pleasure involved in the sense of being a superior person.
Nor, if it were, would there be any ground for holding the
man so actuated to be really happier than the fool or the
selfish man, who, according to his standard of measurement,
has as good a chance of feeling the pleasure of superiority
without corresponding discontent. The truth is that Mill
does not really regard this ' sense of dignity ' as an emotion
in distinction from desire. He regards it as a counter motive
to desires for animal pleasure, which mere emotion could
not be. Nor does he mean that the preference determined
by it is preference for the pleasure of feeling superior to the
pleasures shared with average men. The motive which he
has in view is a desire to be worthy, not a desire to feel the
pleasure of being worth more than others; and he only
regards it as desire for pleasure at all, because he fancies
that a desire, of which the disappointment makes me un-
happy, is therefore a desire for happiness— that a jJesire is,
forjhe pleasure which ensues upojn its satisfaction.
167. The real ground then of Mill's departure from the
stricter Utilitarian doctrine, that the worth of pleasure de-
pends simply on its amount, is his virtual surrender of the
doctrine that all desire is for pleasure; but he does not
recognise this surrender, because he thinks that to call a
desired object part of the happiness of the person desiring it ,
is equivalent to saying that the desire for the object is a
desire for pleasure. Yet little reflection is needed to show
igo MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
that it is not so. The latter proposition can only mean that
a possible action or experience is contemplated as likely to
be pleasant, and is then desired for the sake of the pleasure.
It means that the anticipation of pleasure determines desire.
But the other proposition, that a desired object is part of the
happiness of the person desiring it, rather means that desire
determines the anticipation of pleasure; that, given desire
for an object, however different from pleasure that object
may be, there results pleasure, or at least a removal of pain,
in the satisfaction of the desire ; that the man feeling the
desire necessarily looks forward to this result as part of
a possible happiness to come, and cannot be completely
happy till the object is attained. This is equivalent to
saying, as has been so often mentioned above, that to
desire an object is to seek self-satisfaction in its attainment,
but it does not in the least imply that pleasure is the object
in which self-satisfaction is sought.
168. The same is true of the other forms in which Mill
expresses the conception on which he considers the proof
of Utilitarianism to rest. 'Desiring a thing and finding
it pleasant . . . are two parts of the same phenomenon.'
' To think of an object as desirable . . . and to think of it
as pleasant are one and the same thing '.' Both statements
are ambiguous. Each is in a sense true, but not in the
sense which would imply that a pleasure is the only possible
object of desire. In the latter statement, what is meant
by 'thinking of an object as desirable'? Does it mean
thinking of it as one that should be desired ? Thus under-
stood, the statement would lose all plausibility. No one
would pretend that to think of an object as one which he
should desire is the same thing as thinking of it as pleasant.
Rather, so long as he thinks of it as one in which he finds
pleasure, it is impossible for him to place it in any such
relation to himself as could be represented by saying that
he thinks of it as an object which he should desire. Nor
is there any sign that Mill uses the terms ' desired ' and
' Utilitarianism, p. 58.
CH. l] PLEASURE AND DESIRE 19I
'desirable' esscept as pretty much equivalent. To 'think
of an object as desirable ' means with him to reflect on it as
one that is desired. Now it is quite true that I cannot
reflect on an object as one that I desire without thinking
of it as pleasant, in the sense that I cannot reflect on my
desire for it without thinking of the pleasure there would
be in the satisfaction of the desire. But this in no way
implies that the desire is a desire for that or any other
pleasure.
As regards the other statement, if the 'phenomenon'
under consideration is taken to include both the desire for
an object and the satisfaction of that desire in the attain-
ment of its object, then to desire the object and to find
its attainment pleasant are doubtless parts of that one phe-
nomenon. If, on the other hand, the phenomenon is held
to be confined to the desire, and not to include its satis-
faction, then ' to find a thing pleasant ' is no part of the
phenomenon ; for unsatisfied desire involves no pleasure.
We may suppose, however, that ' to find it pleasant ' is here
hastily written for ' to anticipate pleasure from it.' Thus
interpreted, the statement is indisputable so far as it goes.
To desire an object, and to anticipate pleasure from its
attainment, are certainly parts of one and the same phe-
nomenon. But the question remains of the relation in
which the two parts of the phenomenon stand to each other.
Is it always the anticipation of pleasure from an object that
excites the desire for it, or are there cases in which the
anticipation of pleasure in the satisfaction of desire arises
out of an independent desire for an object which is not
pleasure at all? The former is the view which Mill believed
himself to hold, and which his ' Proof of Utilitarianism '
requires ; but the proposition under consideration is equally
compatible with the latter view, and it may be doubted
whether it would have seemed so self-evident to most readers,
or even to Mill himself, if it were not so.
169. The reason for this doubt as regards Mill himself
is that he insists upon the reality of desires which, as he
192 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [ek. Ill
describes them, are only desires iot pleasure in the improper
and illogical sense ; which are not determined by an ante-
cedent imagination of pleasure ; but from which there results
pleasure in the attainment of the desired object, pain in its
absence. Thus, having pointed out that the Utilitarian
doctrine requires us to consider happiness, or pleasure, the
only thing desirable as an end, he goes on to say ^ that ' it
maintains not only that virtue is to be desired, but that it is
to be desired disinterestedly,' i.e., as he explains, not as
a means to ' any end beyond it' The mind, he tells us, is
' not in a right state, not in a state conformable to Utility,'
unless it so desires virtue. But such desire for virtue is
clearly not determined by any antecedent imagination of
pleasure. It is of course open to any one to argue that
what is called desire for virtue is really desire for pleasures
that are to be obtained in a certain way ; but in that case
virtue is not an ultimate object of desire, the desire for it is
not disinterested. That presentation of virtue which deter-
mines any disinterested desire for it, can only be a pre-
sentation of a possible state of character or mode of action
as an ideal object which we seek to realise ; and the object
thus presented cannot be identified with any pleasant feeling
or series of feelings, which, having experienced it, we imagine
and desire to experience again. If, then, the presentation
of virtue as an ultimate object, and not merely as a means,
does determine desire, there are desires which are not ex-
cited by the anticipation of pleasure, though in such cases as
much as in any other the desired object, just so far as desired,
is ' part of the happiness ' of the person desiring it, in the
sense that, having desired it, he cannot be happy without it..
There are other objects of desire recognised by Mill —
money, power, fame— which he admits are not pleasures
(though to power and fame, he thinks, 'there is a certain
amount of immediate pleasure annexed ^ '), but which have
yet come to be desired for their own sake. In regard to
them, as in regard to virtue, he suggests that they were ori-
' Utilitarianism, p. 54. = Ibid., p. 55.
CH. l] PLEASURE AND DESIRE 193
ginally desired as means, as conducive to pleasure or to pro-
tection from pain, but he does not pretend that, by those
who desire them most strongly, they are so desired any
longer. ' What was once desired as an instrument for the
attainment of happiness has come to be desired for its own
sake.' That the desire for them originated in a desire for
pleasure is, indeed, a view founded on the assumption that
pleasures alone are wished for. To aid in the attainment of
our wishes, as these things do, is with Mill the same thing
as to aid in the attainment of pleasure. But we may waive
this point, for questions as to the history of any desire do
not affect its present relation to its object. If money, fame,
and power are desired not as a means to pleasure but for
their own sake — and this Mill admits — then there are de-
sires, whatever their history, which are not desires for plea-
sure, however essential their gratification may be to the hap-
piness of those who so desire.
170. As against the view, therefore, that all desire is for
some pleasure or other, from which it would seem to follow
that the good will cannot differ intrinsically, or as desire,
from the bad, but only in virtue of effects in the way of
pleasure and pain, we may adduce the involuntary evidence
of the most eminent modern advocate of that view. We
find him explicitly recognising desires which, as they exist,
however they may have originated, are not desires for plea-
sure, and which he only brings under his general theory
of desire on the ground that the objects of such desires are
desired by us as part of our happiness. But this, as we
have seen, is no more than saying that they are desired by
a self-conscious subject, who in all desire, or at any rate
in all that amounts to will, is seeking self-satisfaction, and
who, so far as he reflects on any desire, reflects also on the
pleasure of its possible fulfilment. It leaves the question
open what the ideal object is, in the realisation of which
self-satisfaction is sought. It does not exclude the possi-
bility of its being even the endurance of pain, as perhaps,
under sterner conditions of society than ours, or under the
o
194 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
influence of fanatical belief, it not unfrequently has been.
The formula is at any rate elastic enough to allow of the
strong assertion by Mill himself, that the attainment of a
certain disposition may be an object of desire in itself,
irrespectively of any pleasures that flow from it. We may
return then to examine the question whether there is any
intrinsic distinction between objects willed, on which the
difference between a good and a bad will may rest, without
allowing ourselves to be stopped in limine by a denial of
the possibility of such distinction and a reduction of all
motives, however various in their effects, to desire for some
pleasure or other on the part of the person desiring.
171. It will have appeared from the foregoing discussion
that the primary difference between the view here advanced
and that of ' Hedonistic ' philosophers relates to the generic
definition of the good — not only of the morally good, but
of good in the wider sense. Whereas with them the good
generically is the pleasant, in this treatise the common
characteristic of the good is that it satisfies some desire.
In all satisfaction of desire there is pleasure, and thus
pleasantness in an object is a necessary incident of its being
good. We cannot think of an object as good, i.e. such as
will satisfy desire, without thinking of it as in consequence
such as will yield pleasure; but its pleasantness depends
•on its goodness, not its goodness upon the pleasure it
conveys. This pleasure, according to our view, so far as
it is a necessary incident of any good, presupposes desire
and results from its satisfaction, while according to the
Hedonistic view desire presupposes an imagination of plea-
sure. The importance of this distinction, which may at
first sight seem somewhat finely drawn, will appear as soon
as we consider its bearing on the question of the distin-
guishing nature of the moral good, or on that other form
of the same question — the form in which it seems to have
been first raised by philosophy — in which it is enquired, how
the true good differs from the merely apparent.
CH. l] MORAL GOOD I95
If the generic definition of good is that it is pleasure, the
moral good as distinct from the natural can only be plea-
sure obtained in a particular way; either simply pleasure
experienced as a result of intentional action, in distinction
from such pleasure as comes to us in a natural course of
events which we have not contributed to bring about, or
such pleasure as, in Locke's language, ' is not the natural
product and consequence of the action itself,' but is
attached to it by some positive law, either the law of GiDd,
or civil law, or the law of opinion'. This at any rate
is what ' moral good ' according to this view must mean,
so long as it is understood to be the designation of an end.
As a designation of means, it will be applicable to actions
which tend to produce the pleasure obtainable in the par-
ticular manner described. From the same point of view
the apparent good can only be distinguished from the true
as a pleasure of which the enjoyment in its consequences
yields a preponderance of pain over pleasure, whether to
the individual enjoying it or (according to the Utilitarian
view) to the majority of persons or of sentient beings. On
the other hand, regarding the good generically as that which
satisfies desire, but considering the objects we desire to be
by no means necessarily pleasures, we shall naturally dis-
tinguish the moral good as that which satisfies the desire
of a moral agent, or that in which a moral agent can find
the satisfaction of himself which he necessarily seeks. The
true good we shall understand in the same way. It is an
' See Locke's Essay, Book II. ch. xxviii. § 5 : 'Good and evil are
nothing but pleasure or pain, or that which occasions or procures plea-
sure or pain to us. Moral good and evil, then, is only the conformity
or disagreement of our voluntary actions to some law, whereby good or
evil [«. «. pleasure or pain] is drawn on us by the will and power of the
law-maker.' Here it will be seen that the terms ' good and evil,' when
qualified as ' moral,' are transferred from end to means. But, according
to the general definition of ' good and evil ' as equivalent to pleasure
and pain, we must suppose that Locke considered the ' conformity of
our voluntary actions to some law ' to constitute ' moral good ' only
because it brings about the pleasure which, by one or other of the laws
which he recognises, is attached to such conformity.
O 2
196 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. UI
end in which the effort of a moral agent can really find
rest.
172. It will at once be objected that this account of
moral good either tells us nothing at all about it, or only
tells us anything in virtue of some assumption in regard
to moral good involved in our notion of a moral agent.
The objection is in a certain sense a valid one. The
question, What is our moral nature or capability ? — in other
words, What do we mean by calling ourselves moral
agents? — is one to which a final answer cannot be given
without an answer to the question, What is moral good ?
For the moral good is the realisation of the moral capability,
and we cannot fully know what any capability is till we
know its ultimate realisation. It may be argued therefore
that we either know what the moral good in this sense is,
and accordingly have no need to infer what it is from our
moral nature, or else we do not know what it is, in which
case neither can we know what the moral nature is from
which we profess to infer what the moral good is.
The answer is that from a moral capability which had not
realised itself at all nothing could indeed be inferred as to
the moral good which can only consist in its full realisation-
but that the moral capability of man is not in this wholly
undeveloped state. To a certain extent it has shown by
actual achievement what it has in it to become, and by
reflection on the so' far developed activity we can form at
least some negative conclusion in regard to its complete
realisation. We may convince ourselves that this realisa-
tion can only be attained in certain directions of our acti-
vity, not in others. We cannot indeed describe any state
in which man, having become all that he is capable of be-
coming— all that, according to the divine plan of the world,
he is destined to become — would find rest for his soul. We
cannot conceive it under any forms borrowed from our ac-
tual experience, for our only experience of activity is of such
as implies incompleteness. Of a life of completed develop-
ment, of activity with the end attained, we can only speak
CH.l] MORAL GOOD
197
or think in negatives, and thus only can we speak or think
of that state of being in which, according to our theory, the
ultimate moral good must consist. Yet the conviction that
there must be such a state of being, merely negative as is
our theoretical apprehension of it, may have supreme in-
fluence over conduct, in moving us to that effort after the
Better which, at least as a conscious effort, implies the con-
viction of there being a Best.
And when the speculative question is raised as to what
this Best can be, we find that it has not left itself without
witness. The practical struggle after the Better, of which
the idea of there being a Best has been the spring, has
taken such effect in the world of man's affairs as makes
the way by which the Best is to be more nearly approached
plain enough to him that will see. In the broad result it
is not hard to understand how man has bettered himself
through institutions and habits which tend to make the
welfare of all the welfare of each, and through the arts which
make nature, both as used and as contemplated, the friend
of man. And just so far as this is plain, we know enough
of ultimate moral good to guide our conduct ; enough to
judge whether the prevailing interests which make our char-
acter are or are not in the direction which tends further to
realise the capabilities of the human spirit.
173. But here again it may be urged that we are going
too fast, that we are making huge assumptions. We seem
to be taking for granted that there is some best state of
being for man — best in the sense that in it lies the full
realisation of his capabilities, and that in it therefore alone
he can satisfy himself, though as a matter of fact in his
efforts after self-satisfaction he constantly acts in a manner
inconsistent with his attaining it. We seem to be taking
for granted, further, that this best state of man is already
present to some divine consciousness, so that it may pro-
perly be said to be the vocation of man to attain it ; that
some unfulfilled and unrealised, but still operative, idea of
there being such a state has been the essential influence in
198 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
the process by which man has so far bettered himself ; and
that a continued operation of the same idea in us, with that
growing definiteness which is gathered from reflection on
the actions and institutions in which it has so far manifested
itself, is the condition of character and conduct being mor-
ally good in the proper sense of the words. How are such
assumptions to be justified?
174. In order to justify them, we must in the first place
recall the conclusions arrived at in an earlier stage of this
treatise. We saw reason to hold that the existence of one
connected world, which is the presupposition of knowledge,
implies the action of one self-conditioning and self-deter-
mining mind; and that, as our knowledge, so our moral
activity was only explicable on supposition of a certain repro-
duction of itself, on the part of this eternal mind, as the self
of man — 'a reproduction of itself to which it makes the
processes of animal life organic, and which is qualified and
limited by the nature of those processes, but which is so far
essentially a reproduction of the one supreme subject, im-
plied in the existence of the world, that the product carries
with it under all its limitations and qualifications the char-
acteristic of being an object to itself (§ 99). Proof ofsuch
a_dpctiine,jn the ordijiary-S?pse of thejTOrd,JrqmJhe_ na-
ture ojUhe-caseibere cannot Jje. It is not a truth deducible
from other established or conceded truths. It is not a state-
ment of an event or matter of fact that can be the object of
experiment or observation. It represents a conception tOk^
which no perceivable or imaginable object can possibly cor-
respond, but one that affords the only means by which, re-
flecting on our moral and intellectual experience conjointly,
taking the world and ourselves into account, we can put the
whole thing together and understand how (not why, but
how) we are and do what we consciously are and do. Given
this conception, and not without it, we can at any rate ex-
press that which it cannot be denied demands expression,
the nature of man's reason and man's will, of human pro-
gress and human short-coming, of the effort after good and
CH.l] MORAL GOOD 199
the failure to gain it, of virtue and vice, in their connection
and in their distinction, in their essential opposition and in
their no less essential unity.
175. The reason and^wilL_of man„ have. .their. COininon.
ground^ in that_characterist^ of being an_ object. tojhimself
which, as_we_have said,Jielongs_to him- in- so-£ar_as_ihe,
eternal jnindj^ through the medium of an anhnal organism
and under limitations .atisiiig from .the- employment, of such
a medjumj reproduces jtselCiiibim. It is in virtue of this
self-objectifying principle that he is determined, not simply
by natural wants according 'to natural laws, but by the
thought of himself as existing under certain conditions, and
as having ends that may be attained and capabilities that
may be realised under those conditions. It is thus that he
not merely desires but seeks to satisfy himself in gaining the
objects of his desire ; presents to himself a certain possible
state of himselfj which in the gratification of the desire he
seeks to reach ; in short, wills. It is thus, again, that he
has the impulse to make himself what he has the possibility
of becoming but actually is not, and hence not merely, like
the plant or animal, undergoes a process of development,
but seeks to, and does, develop himself. The conditions
of the animal soul, 'servile to every skiey influence,' no
sooner sated than wanting, are such that the self-determining
spirit cannot be conscious of them as conditions to which
it is subject — and it is so subject and so conscious of its
subjection in the human person — without seeking some
satisfaction of it$elf, some realisation of its capabilities, that
shall be independent of those conditions.
176. Hence arises the impulse which becomes the source,
according to the direction it takes, both of vice and of
virtue. It is the source of vicious self-seeking and self-
assertion, so far as the spirit which is in man seeks to satisfy
itself or to realise its capabilities in modes in which, accord-
ing to the law which its divine origin imposes on it and
which is equally the law of the universe and of human
society, its self-satisfaction or self-realisation is not to be
20O MORAL WEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. HI
found. Such, for instance — so self-defeating — is the quest
for self-satisfaction in the life of the voluptuary. Animals
are not voluptuaries ; for, if they seek pleasure at all, they
do so in the sense that they are stimulated to action by the
images of this pleasure and that, as those images recur.
They are not objects to themselves, as men are, and there-
fore cannot set themselves, as the voluptuary does, to seek
self satisfaction in the enjoyment of all the pleasures that are
to be had. It is one and the same principle of his nature —
his divine origin, in the sense explained — which makes it
possible for the voluptuary to seek self-satisfaction, and thus
to live for pleasure, at all, and which according to the law
of its being, according to its inherent capability, makes it
impossible that the self-satisfaction should be found in any
succession of pleasures. So it is again with the man who
seeks to assert himself, to realise himself, to show what he
has in him to be, in achievements which may make the
world wonder, but which in their social effects are such that
the human spirit, according to the law of its being, which
is a law of development in society, is not advanced but
hindered by them in the realisation of its capabilities. He
is living for ends of which the divine principle that forms
his self alone renders him capable, but these ends, because
in their attainment one is exalted by the depression of
others, are not in the direction in which that principle can
really fulfil the promise and potency which it contains.
How in particular and in detail that fulfilment is to be
attained, we can only tell in so far as some progress has
actually been made towards its attainment in the knowledge,
arts, habits, and institutions through which man has so far
become more at home in nature, and through which one
member of the human family has become more able and
more wishful to help another. But the condition of its fur-
ther fulfilment is the will in some form or other to contribute
to its fulfilment. And hence the differentia of the virtuous
life, proceeding as it does from the same self-objectifying
principle which we have just characterised as the source of
CH. l] MORAL GOOD 201
the vicious life, is that it is governed by the consciousness
of there being some perfection which has to be attained,
some vocation which has to be fulfilled, some law which
has to be obeyed, something absolutely desirable, whatever
the individual may for the time desire ; that it is in minis-
tering to such an end that the agent seeks to satisfy himself.
However meagrely the perfection, the vocation, the law may
be conceived, the consciousness that there is such a thing,
so far as it directs the will, must at least keep the man to
the path in which human progress has so far been made.
It must keep him loyal in the spirit to established morality,
industrious in some work of recognised utility. What fur-
ther result it will yield, whether it will lead to a man's mak-
ing any original contribution to the perfecting of life, will
depend on his special gifts and circumstances. Though
these are such, as is the case with most of us, that he has
no chance of leaving the world or even the society imme-
diately about him observably better than he found it, yet in
' the root of the matter ' — as having done loyally, or ' from
love of his work ' (which means under consciousness of an
ideal), or in religious language ' as unto the Lord,' the work
that lay nearest him — he shares the goodness of the man
who devotes a genius to the bettering of human life.
177. It may seem that in the preceding section we have
gone off prematurely into an account of virtue and vice, in
respect at once of the common ground of their possibility
and of their essential difference, without the due preliminary
explanation of the relation between reason and will. A
very little reflection, however, on what has been said will
show the way in which this relation is conceived. By will
is understood, as has been explained, an effort (or capacity
for such effort) on the part of a self-conscious subject to
satisfy itself : by reason, in the practical sense, the capacity
on the part of such a subject to conceive a better state of
itself as an end to be attained by action. This is what will
and reason are severally taken to imply in the most primitive
form in which they appear in us. A being without capacity J
202 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. HI
for such effort or such conception would not, upon our
theory, be considered to have will or reason. In this most
primitive form they are alike modes of that eternal principle
of self-objectification which we hold to be reproducing itself
in man through the medium of an animal organism, and of
which the action is equally necessary to knowledge and to
morality. There is thus essentially or in principle an identity
between reason and will ; and widely as they become diver-
gent in the actual history of men (in the sense that the
objects where good is actually sought are often not those
where reason, even as in the person seeking them, pro-
nounces that it is to be found), still the true development
of man, the only development in which the capabilities of
his 'heaven-born' nature can be actualised, lies in the direc-
tion of union between tlie developed will and the developed
reason. It consists in so living that the objects in which self-
satisfaction is habitually sought contribute to the realisation
of a true idea of what is best for man — such an idea as our
reason would have when it had come to be all which it has
the possibility of becoming, and which, as in God, it is.
178. Such a life, as in vague forecast conceived, has
always been called, according to a usage inherited from the
Greek fathers of moral philosophy, a life according to
reason. And this usage is in harmony with the definition
just given of reason at its lowest potency in us. For any
truest idea of what is best for man that can guide our
action is still a realisation of that capacity for conceiving
a better state of himself, which we must ascribe to every
child whom we can regard as 'father of the man' capable of
morality, to any savage to whom we would affiliate the moral
life that we inherit. Nay, even if we mean by a ' true idea
of what is best for man ' such an adequate and detailed idea
of our perfection as we cannot conceive ourselves to have —
since to have it would imply that the perfection was already
attained, and the conception of ourselves in perfection is one
that we cannot form — still such an idea would be but the
completed expression of that self-realising principle of which
CH. l] MORAL GOOD 203
the primary expression is the capacity, distinctive of the
' animal rationale 'in all its forms, of conceiving itself in a
better state than it is.
On the other hand it must be borne in mind that this
same capacity is the condition, as has been pointed out,
no less of the vicious life than of the virtuous. The self-
objectifying principle cannot exert itself as will without also
exerting itself as reason, though neither as will nor as reason
does it, in the vicious life, exert itself in a direction that
leads to the true development of its capacity. That a man
should seek an object as ' part of his happiness,' or as one
without which in his then state he cannot satisfy himself, —
and this is to will — implies that he presents himself to
himself as in a better state with the object attained than
he is without it; and this is to exercise reason. Every
form of vicious self-seeking is conditioned by such presenta-
tion and, in that sense, by reason. Why then, it may be
asked, should the moralising influence in man, the faculty
through which the paths of virtue are marked out, whether
followed or no, be specially called reason ? We answer :
because it is through the operative consciousness in man
of a possible state of himself better than the actual, though
that consciousness is the condition of the possibility of all
that is morally wrong, that the divine self-realising principle
in him gradually fulfils its capability in the production of
a higher life. With this consciousness^ directed in the
right path, i.e. the path in which it tends to become what
according to the immanent divine law of its being it has in
it to be — and it is as so directed that we call it ' practical
reason ' — rests the initiative of all virtuous habit and action.
170. It is true that, just so far as this consciousness is
operative in the direction supposed, it carries an improvement
of the will with it. Men come to seek their satisfaction,
their good, in objects conceived as desirable because con-
tributing to the best state or perfection of man ; and this
change we describe by saying that their will becomes con-
formable to their reason. For the self-realisation of the
204 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
divine principle in man this change of will is just as necessary
as the development of practical reason, and to an intelligence
which could view the process as a whole would appear
inseparable from it. But to us who view the process piece-
meal, ourselves representing certain stages in it, it is natural
to treat the development of practical reason, /. e. the gradual
filling up and definition of the idea of human perfection,
as a separate process, upon which the corresponding con-
formation of will may or may not ensue. We see that in
the individual the idea of what is good for him in his actual
state of passion and desire — the idea which in fact he seeks
to realise in action — is apt not to correspond to his convic-
tion of what is truly good. That conviction is the echo in
him of the expression which practical reason has so far
given to itself in those institutions, usages, and judgments
of society, which contribute to the perfection of life, but his
desires and habits are not yet so far conformed to it that he
can seek his good in obeying it, that he can will as it directs.
He knows the better — knows it, in a sense, even as better
for himself, for he can think of himself as desiring what he
does not, but feels that he should, desire — but he prefers the
worse. His will, we say, does not answer to his reason.
It is thus natural for us to treat will and reason as separate
and even as conflicting faculties, though when we reflect on
moral action in its real integrity we see that it involves each
alike, and that it is only some better reason with which in
vicious action a man's will conflicts, while there is an exercise
of reason by him which is the very condition of his vicious-
ness. The 'better' reason is his capacity for conceiving
a good of his own, so far as that capacity is informed by
those true judgments in regard to human good which the
action of the eternal spirit in man has hitherto yielded;
while the reason which shows itself in his actual vice is the
same capacity, as taking its object and content from desires
of which the satisfaction is inconsistent with the real better-
ing of man. But just because it is this capacity in a man
which, while it alone renders selfishness in all its forms
CH. l] MORAL GOOD 205
possible, is the medium through which alone ideas of
a better life than he is living are brought home to him —
ideas themselves arising from the development of this
capacity as it has so far gone in men — we are right, when
once we have allowed ourselves to treat reason and will as
separate faculties, in regarding reason as the one which has
the initiative in the bettering of life. In the same way of
thinking we may properly ascribe to reason — not as gradually
unfolding itself in us, but as in the perfection to which that
process tends, and which we must suppose to be actually
attained in the eternal mind — a fully articulated idea of the
best life for man, and accordingly speak of life according
to reason as the goal of our moral effort. Meanwhile the
error which lies in the treatment of reason and will as
separate faculties we may correct by bearing in mind that
it is one and the same self of which reason and will are
alike capacities ; that in every moral action, good or bad,
each capacity is exerted as much as the other; and that
every step forward in the self-realisation of the divine
principle in man involves a determination of will no less
than of reason, not merely a conception of a possible good
for man, but the adoption by some man or men of that
good as his or theirs.
CHAPTER II
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MORAL IDEAL
A. Tfw Personal Character of the Moral Ideal
180. Let us pause here to take stock of the conclusions
so far arrived at. It will be convenient to state them in
dogmatic form, begging the reader to understand that this
form is adopted to save time, and does not betoken undue
assurance on the part of the writer. Through certain media,
and under certain consequent limitations, but with the
constant characteristic of self-consciousness and self-objecti-
fication, the one divine mind gradually reproduces itself in
the human soul. In virtue of this principle in him man
has definite capabilities, the realisation of which, since in it
alone he can satisfy himself, forms his true good. They
are not realised, however, in any life that can be observed,
in any life that has been, or is, or (as it would seem) that
can be lived by man as we know him ; and for this reason
we cannot say with any adequacy what the capabilities are^
Yet, because the essence of man's spiritual endowment is
the consciousness of having it, the idea of his having such
capabilities, and of a possible better state of himself con-
sisting in their further realisation, is a moving influence in
him. It has been the parent of the institutions and usages,
of the social judgments and aspirations, through which
human life has been so far bettered ; through which man
has so far realised his capabilities and marked out the path
that he must follow in their further realisation. As his true
good is or would be ^ their complete realisation, so his good-
' We say that his true good is this complete realisation when we think
of the realisation as already attained in the eternal mind. We say that
it would be such realisation when we think of the realisation as for ever
problematic to man in the state of which we have experience.
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MORAL IDEAL 207
ness is proportionate to his habitual responsiveness to the
idea of there being such a true good, in the various forms
of recognised duty and beneficent work in which that idea
has so far taken shape among men. In other words, it
consists in the direction of the will to objects determined
for it by this idea, as operative in the person willing ; which
direction of the will we may, upon the ground stated, fitly
call its determination by reason.
181. Our next step should b^stoexplainfyrther how it is
that the idea in man of a possible" better state of himself,
consisting in a. further realisation of his capabilities, has
been the moralising agent in human Kfe ; how it has yielded
our moral standards, loyalty to which — itself the product of
the same idea — is the condition of goodness in the individual.
Before we attempt this explanation, however, it will be well
to clear up an ambiguity which will probably be thought to
lurk in the doctrine already advanced. We have spoken
of a certain ' divine principle ' as the ground of human will
and reason ; as realising itself in man ; as having capabilities
of which the full development would constitute the perfection
of human life ; of direction to objects contributory to this
perfection as characteristic of a good will. But what, it will
be asked, is to be understood in regard to the relation of
this 'divine principle' to the will and reason of individuals?
Does it realise itself in persons, in you and me, or in some
impersonal Humanity ? Do the capabilities spoken of admit
of fulfilment in individuals, or is the perfection of human
life some organisation of society in which the individual is
a perfectly adjusted means to an end which he is not in
himself? Until these questions have been dealt with,
a suspicion may fairly be entertained that we have been
playing fast and loose with the conception of man as in
himself an end to himself. We have been taking advan-
tage, it may be said, of a speculation in regard to the
development of the human race, which is quite a different
thing from what is naturally understood by a moral progress
of the individual, to justify a theory which that speculation.
2o8 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. hi
fairly interpreted, tends rather to invalidate. The theory
we want to maintain is one that would found a supposed
duty, and a supposed possible effort, on the part of the
individual to make himself better, upon an ideal in him of
a possible moral perfection, upon a conception actuating
him of something that he may possibly become as an
absolute end in himself. Does not the belief in a develop-
ment of the human race, which individuals indeed unwit-
tingly promote but perish in promoting, logically involve
the complete negation of such a theory?
182. It is clearly of the very essence of the doctrine above
advanced that the divine principle, which we suppose to be
realising itself in man, should be supposed to realise itself in
persons, as such. But for reflection on our personality, on
our consciousness of ourselves as objects to ourselves, we
could never dream of there being such a self-realising prin-
ciple at all, whether as implied in the world or in ourselves.
It is only because we are consciously objects to ourselves,
that we can conceive a world as an object to a single mind,
and thus as a connected whole. It is the irreducibility of
this self-objectifying consciousness to anything else, the
impossibility of accounting for it as an effect, that compels
us to regard it as the presence in us of the mind for which
the world exists. To admit therefore that the self-realisation
of the divine principle can take place otherwise than in a
consciousness which is an object to itself, would be in con-
tradiction of the very ground upon which we believe that a
divine principle does so realise itself in man. Personality,
no doubt, is a term that has often been fought over without
any very precise meaning being attached to it. If we mean
anything else by it than the quality in a subject of being
consciously an object to itself, we are not justified in saying
that it necessarily belongs to God and to any being in whom
God in any measure reproduces or realises himself. But
whatever we mean by personality, and whatever difficulties
may attach to the notion that a divine principle realises itself
through a qualifying medium in the persons of men, it is
CH. II] CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MORAL IDEAL 209
certain that we shall only fall into contradictions by substi-
tuting for persons, as the subject in which the divine self-
realisation takes place, any entity to which self-consciousness
cannot intelligibly be ascribed. If it is impossible that the
divine self-realisation should be complete in such persons as
we are or can conceive ourselves coming to be, on the other
hand in the absence of self-objectification, which is at least
the essential thing in personality, it cannot even be inchoate.
183. This consideration has an important bearing upon
certain ways of thinking or speaking in which we are apt to
take refuge when, having adopted a theory of the moral life
as the fulfilment in the human spirit of some divine idea, we
are called upon to face the diflficulty of stating whether and
how the fulfilment is really achieved. Any life which the
individual can possibly live is at best so limited by the
necessities of his position, that it seems impossible, on sup-
position that a divine self-realising principle is at work in it,
that it should be an adequate expression of such a principle.
Granted the most entire devotion of a man to the attainment
of objects contributory to human perfection, the very con-
dition of his effectually promoting that end is that the
objects in which he is actually interested, and upon which
he really exercises himself, should be of Umited range. The
idea, unexpressed and inexpressible, of some absolute and
all-embracing end is, no doubt, the source of such devotion,
but it can only take effect in the fulfilment of some particular
function in which it finds but restricted utterance. It is in
fact only so far as we are members of a society, of which we
can conceive the common good as our own, that the idea
has any practical hold on us at all, and this very membership
implies confinement in our individual realisation of the idea.
Each has primarily to fulfil the duties of his station. His
capacity for action beyond the range of those duties is
definitely bounded, and with it is definitely bounded also
his sphere of personal interests, his character, his realised
possibility. No one so confined, it would seem, can exhibit
all that the Spirit, working through and in him, properly
2IO MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
and potentially is. Yet is not such confinement the con-
dition of the only personality that we know ? It is the con-
dition of social life, and social life is to personality what
language is to thought. Language presupposes thought as
a capacity, but in us the capacity of thought is only actual-
ised in language. So human society presupposes persons in
capacity — subjects capable each of conceiving himself and
the bettering of his life as an end to himself — but it is only
in the intercourse of men, each recognised by each as an
end, not merely a means, and thus as having reciprocal
claims, that the capacity is actualised and that we really live
as persons. If society then (as thus appears) is the con-
dition of all development of our personality, and if the
necessities of social life, as alone we know or can conceive
it, put limits to our personal development, can we suppose
it to be in persons that the spirit operative in men finds its
full expression and realisation ?
184. It is from this difficulty that we are apt to seek an
escape by speaking as if the human spirit fulfilled its idea in
the history or development of mankind, as distinct from the
persons whose experiences constitute that history, or who
are developed in that development ; whether in the achieve-
ments of great nations at special epochs of their history, or
in some progress towards a perfect organisation of society,
of which the windings and back-currents are too complex
for it to be surveyed by us as a whole. But that we are
only disguising the difficulty, not escaping it, by this manner
of speech, we shall see upon reflecting that there can be
nothing in a nation however exalted its mission, or in
a society however perfectly organised, which is not in the
persons composing the nation or the society. Our ultimate
standard of worth is an ideal of personal worth. All other
values are relative to value for, of, or in a person. To speak
of any progress or improvement or development of a nation
or society or mankind, except as relative to some greater
worth of persons, is to use words without meaning. The
saying that ' a nation is merely an aggregate of individuals '
CH. n] CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MORAL IDEAL 211
is indeed fallacious, but mainly on account of the introduc-
tion of the emphatic 'merely.' The fallacy lies in the
implication that the individuals could be what they are,
could have their moral and spiritual quahties, independently
of their existence in a nation. The notion is conveyed that
they bring those qualities with them ready-made into the
national existence, which thereupon results from their
combination ; while. the__truth is that, whatever jaoral
capacity must he prp«"prased. it is only actualised through
the habits, institutions, and lags,Jn _virtue of which the
individuals forin_a nation. But it is none the less true that
the life of the nation has no real existence except as the life
of the individuals composing the nation, a life determined
by their intercourse with each other, and deriving its peculiar
features from the conditions of that intercourse.
Nor, unless we allow ourselves to play fast and loose
with the terms ' spirit ' and ' will,' can we suppose a national
spirit and will to exist except as the spirit and will of indi-
viduals, affected in a certain way by intercourse with each
other and by the history of the nation. Since it is only
through its existence as our self-consciousness that we know
anything of spirit at all, to hold that a spirit can exist except
as a self-conscious subject is self-contradictory. A ' national
spirit' is not something in the air; nor is it a series of
phenomena of a particular kind; nor yet is it God — the
eternal Spirit or self-conscious subject which communicates
itself, in measure and under conditions, to beings which
through that communication become spiritual. It would
seem that it could only mean one of two things ; either {a)
some type of personal character, as at any time exhibited
by individuals who are held together and personally modified
by national ties and interests which they recognise as such ;
or (b) such a type of personal character as we may suppose
should result, according to the divine idea of the world,
from the intercourse of individuals with each other under
the influence of the common institutions which make a
particular nation, whether that type of character is actually
2t2 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
attained or no. At any rate, if a ' national spirit ' is held
to be a form in which an eternal Spirit, in the only sense in
which we have reason to think there is such a thing, realises
itself, then it can only have its being in persons, though in
persons, of course, specially modified by the special condi-
tions of their intercourse with each other. The degree of
perfection, of realisation of their possibilities, attained by
these persons is the measure of the fulfilment which the idea
of the human spirit attains in the particular national spirit.
If the fulfilment of the idea is necessarily incomplete in them,
it can be no more complete in the national spirit, which has no
other existence, as national, than that which it has in them.
185. A like criticism must apply to any supposition that
the spirit which is in man could fulfil its capabihty — the
capability which belongs to it as a self-realisation of the
eternal mind through the medium of an animal soul — in
some history of mankind or some organisation of society,
except in respect of a state of personal being attained by
the individuals who are subjects of the history or members
of the society. It does not appear how any idea should
express or realise itself in an endless series of events, unless
the series is relative to something beyond itself, which
abides while it passes ; and such a mere endless series the
history of mankind must be, except so far as its results are
gathered into the formation of the character of abiding
persons. At any rate the idea of a spirit cannot realise
itself except in spirits. The human spirit cannot develope
itself according to its idea except in self-conscious subjects,
whose possession of the qualities — all implying self-con-
sciousness— that are proper to such a spirit, in measures
gradually approximating to the realisation of the idea, forms
its development. The spiritual progress of mankind is thus
an unmeaning phrase, unless it means a progress o/' personal
character and to personal character — a progress of which
feeling, thinking, and willing subjects are the agents and
sustainers, and of which each step is a fuller realisation of
the capacities of such subjects. It is simply unintelligible
CH. Il] CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MORAL IDEAL 213
unless understood to be in the direction of more perfect
forms of personal life.
There may be reason to hold that there are capacities of
the human spirit not realisable in persons under the condi-
tions of any society that we know, or can positively conceive,
or that may be capable of existing on the earth. Such a
belief may be warranted by the consideration on the one
hand of the promise which the spirit gives of itself, both in
its actual occasional achievement and in the aspirations of
which we are individually conscious, on the other hand
of the limitations which the necessity of confinement to
a particular social function seems to impose on individual
attainment. We may in consequence justify the supposi-
tion that the personal life, which historically or on earth
is lived under conditions which thwart its development, is
continued in a society, with which we have no means of
communication through the senses, but which shares in and
carnes further every measure of perfection attained by men
under the conditions of life that we know. Or we may
content ourselves with saying that the personal self-conscious
being, which comes from God, is for ever continued in God.
Or we may pronounce the problem suggested by the con-
stant spectacle of unfulfilled human promise to be simply
insoluble. But meanwhile the negative assurance at any rate
must remain, that a capacity, which is nothing except as
personal, cannot be realised in any impersonal modes of
being.
186. It is not, of course, to be denied that the facts of
human Ufe and history put abundant difficulties in the way
of any theory whatever of human development, as from the
less to the more perfect kind of life, in distinction from
mere generalisations as to the nature of the changes which
society has undergone. If it were not for certain demands
of the spirit which is ourself, the notion of human progress!
could never occur to. us. But these demands, having a.
common ground with the apprehension of facts, are not to I
be suppressed by it. They are an expression of the same '
214 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
principle of self-objectification without which, as we have
seen, there could be no such thing as facts for us, for our
consciousness, at all. Their strength is illustrated by the
persistency with which, in spite of the rebuff they for ever
seem to be receiving from observations of nature and history,
they for ever reassert themselves. It is the consciousness
of possibilities in ourselves, unrealised but constantly in
process of realisation, that alone enables us to read the idea
of development into what we observe of natural life, and to
conceive that there must be such a thing as a plan of the
world. That we can adjust all that we observe to this idea
is plainly not the case. When we have traced processes of
development in particular regions of organic life, we are
scarcely nearer the goal. For, in order to satisfy the idea
\ which sets us upon the search for development, we should
'be able to connect all particular processes of development
with each other, the lower as subservient to the higher, and
to view the world, including human history, as a whole
throughout which there is a concerted fulfilment of capa-
bilities. This we cannot do ; but neither our inability to
do it, nor the appearance of positive inconsistency between
much that we observe and any scheme of universal develop-
ment, can weaken the authority of the idea, which does not
rest on the evidence of observation but expresses an inward
demand for the recognition of a unity in the world answering
to the unity of ourselves— a demand involved in that self-
consciousness which, as we have seen, alone enables us to
observe facts as such. The important thing is that we should
not, in eagerness to reconcile the idea of development with
facts known only bit by bit and not in their real integrity,
lose sight of the essential implications of the idea itself.
187. Of these implications one is the eternal realisation
for, or in, the eternal mind of the capacities gradually realised
in time. Another is that the end of the process of develop-
ment should be a real fulfilment of the capacities presupposed
by the process. When we speak of any subject as in process
of development according to some law, we must mean, if we
CH. u] CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MORAL IDEAL 215
SO speak advisedly, that that into which the subject is being
developed already exists for some consciousness. We
express the same thing by saying that the subject is some-
thing, in itself or potentially, which it has not yet in time
actually become ; and this again implies that in relation to
some conscious being it is eternally that which in some
other relation it is in time coming to be. A state of life or
consciousness not yet attained by a subject capable of it, in
relation to that subject we say actually is not ; but if there
were no consciousness for which it existed, there would be
no sense in saying that in possibility it is, for it would simply
be nothing at all. Thus, when we speak of the human
spirit being in itself, or in possibility, something which is not
yet realised in human experience, we mean that there is
a consciousness for and in which this something really exists,
though, on the other hand, for the consciousness which
constitutes human experience it exists only in possibility.
It would not be enough to say 'a consciousness for
which it really exists.' That might merely mean that this
undeveloped capability of the human spirit existed as an
object of consciousness to the eternal mind, in the same
way in which facts that I contemplate exist for me. Such
a statement would suffice, were the subject of development
merely a natural organism. But when that which is being
developed is itself a self-conscious subject, the end of its
becoming must really exist not merely for, but in or as,
a self-conscious subject. There must be eternally such
a subject which is all that the self-conscious subject, as
developed in time, has the possibility of becoming; in
which the idea of the human spirit, or all that it has in itself
to become, is completely realised. This consideration may
suggest the true notion of the spiritual relation in which we
stand to God ; that He is not merely a Being who has made
us, in the sense that we exist as an object of the divine
consciousness in the same way in which we must suppose
the system of nature so to exist, but that He is a Being in
whom we exist ; with whom we are in principle one ; with
2l6 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. in
whom the human spirit is identical, in the sense that He is
all which the human spirit is capable of becoming.
188. In regard to the other principle which we have
noticed as implied in the idea of development — that the
end of the process of development should be a real fulfil-
ment of the capacities pre-supposed by the process — it may
be argued that, however indisputable, it can afford us little
guidance in judging of the ultimate end to which any
process of development is tending. In cases where end or
function are matter of observation, and capacity or faculty
are inferred from them, it has no application ; and if it is
to be available in other cases, we must have some means
of ascertaining the nature of capacities, independently of
observation of the ends to which they are relative. But
have we any such means ? And in their absence, since the
ultimate end of human progress must be beyond the reach of
observation, are not our conclusions as to capacities of men
which must be fulfilled in the course of human development
mere arbitrary guess-work ? May it not turn out that what
we have been regarding as permanent capacities of men,
from which something might be inferred as to the end of
human development, on the ground that this end must be
such as really to fulfil them, are temporary phases of some
unknown force, working in we know not what direction, and
that their end may be simply to disappear, having borne
their part in the generation of an unknowable future ?
189. To such questions we should reply as follows. We
must be on our guard against lapsing into the notion that
a process ad infinitum, a process not relative to an end,
can be a process of development at all. If the history of
mankind were simply a history of events, of which each
determines the next following, and so on in endless series,
there would be no progress or development in it. As we
cannot sum an infinite series, there would be nothing in
the history of mankind, so conceived, to satisfy that demand
for unity of the manifold in relation to an end, which alone
leads us to read the idea of development into the course
CH. n] CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MORAL IDEAL 217
of human affairs. If there is a progress in the history of
men it must be towards an end consisting in a state
of being which is not itself a series in time, but is both
comprehended eternally in the eternal mind and is intrin-
sically, or in itself, eternal. Further : although any other
capacity may be of a kind which, having done its work in
contributing to the attainment of such a state of being,
passes away in the process of its attainment — as the par-
ticular capacities of myriads of animals, their function ful-
filled, pass away every hour — yet a capacity consisting in
a self-conscious personality cannot be supposed so to pass
away. It partakes of the nature of the eternal. It is not
itself a series in time ; for the series of time exists for it.
We cannot believe in there being a real fulfilment of such
a capacity in an end which should involve its extinction,
because the conviction of there being an end in which our
capacities are fulfilled is founded on our self-conscious
personality — on the idea of an absolute value in a spirit
which we ourselves are. And for the same reason we cannot
believe that the capacities of men— capacities illustrated to
us by the actual institutions of society, though they could
not be so illustrated if we had not an independent idea of
them — can be really fulfilled in a state of things in which
any rational man should be treated merely as a means, and
not as in himself an end. On the whole, our conclusion
must be that, great as are the difficulties which beset the
idea of human development when applied to the facts of
life, we do not escape them but empty the idea of any real
meaning, if we suppose the end of the development to be
one in the attainment of which persons — agents who are
ends to themselves — are extinguished, or one which is other
than a state of self-conscious being, or one in which that
reconciliation of the claims of persons, as each at once
a means to the good of the other and an end to himself,
already partially achieved in the higher forms of human
society, is otherwise than completed.
190. Meanwhile, as must constantly be borne in mind,
2X8 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
in saying that the human spirit can only realise itself, that
the divine idea of man can only be fulfilled, in and through
persons, we are not denying but affirming that the realisation
and fulfilment can only take place in and through society.
Without society, no persons : this is as true as that without
persons, without self-objectifying agents, there could be no
such society as we know. Such society is founded on the
recognition by persons of each other, and their interest in
each other, as persons, i. e. as beings who are ends to them-
selves, who are consciously determined to action by the
conception of themselves, as that for the sake of which they
act. They are interested in each other as persons in so far
as each, being aware that another presents his own self-satis-
faction to himself as an object, finds satisfaction for himself
in procuring or- witnessing the self satisfaction of the other.
Society is founded on such mutual interest, in the sense
that unless it were operative, however incapable of expressing
itself in abstract formulae, there would be nothing to lead
to that treatment by one human being of another as an
end, not merely a means, on which society even in its nar-
rowest and most primitive forms must rest. There would
be nothing to countervail the tendency, inherent in the self-
asserting and self-seeking subject, to make every object he
deals with, even an object of natural affection, a means to
his own gratification. The combination of men as lo-oi
KOI ojioiai for common ends would be impossible. Thus ex-
cept as between persons, each recognising the other as an
end in himself and having the will to treat him as such,
there can be no society.
I But the converse is equally true, that only through society,
'in the sense explained, is personality actualised. Only
through society is any one enabled to give that effect to the
idea of himself as the object of his actions, to the idea of
a possible better state of himself, without which the idea
would remain like that of space to a man who had not the
senses either of sight or touch. Some practical recognition
of personality by another, of an ' I ' by a ' Thou ' and a
CH. Il] CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MORAL IDEAL 2I9
' Thou ' by an ' I,' is necessary to any practical conscious-
ness of it, to any such consciousness of it as can express
itself in act. On the origin of such recognition in the past
we speculate in vain. To whatever primitive groupings, as
a matter of history or of imagination, we can trace our
actual society, these must already imply it. But we know
that we, who are born under an established system of family
ties, and of reciprocal rights and obligations sanctioned
by the state, learn to regard ourselves as persons among
other persons because we are treated as such. From the
dawn of intelligence we are treated, in one way or another,
as entitled to have a will of our own, to make ourselves
the objects of our actions, on condition of our practically
recognising the same title in others. All education goes
on the principle that we are, or are to become, persons in
this sense. And just as it is through the action of society
that the individual comes at once practically to conceive
his personality — his nature as an object to himself — and to
conceive the same personality as belonging to others, so it
is society that supplies all the higher content to this con-
ception, all those objects of a man's personal interest, in
living for which he lives for his own satisfaction, except such
as are derived from the merely animal nature.
191. Thus it is equally true that the human spirit can
only realise itself, or fulfil its idea, in persons, and that it
can only do so through society, since society is the condition
of the development of a personality. But the function of
society being the development of persons, the realisation of
the human spirit in society can only be attained according
to the measure in which that function is fulfilled. It does
not follow from this that all persons must be developed in
the same way. The very existence of mankind presupposes
the distinction between the sexes ; and as there is a necessary
difference between their functions, there must be a corre-
sponding difference between the modes in which the person-
ality of men and women is developed. Again, though we
must avoid following the example of philosophers who have
220 MORAL WEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. HI
shown an a priori necessity for those class-distinctions of
their time which after ages have dispensed with, it would
certainly seem as if distinctions of social position and power
were necessarily incidental to the development of human
personality. There cannot be this development without
a recognised power of appropriating material things. This
appropriation must vary in its effects according to talent
and opportunity, and from that variation again must result
differences in the form which personality takes in different
men. Nor does it appear how those reciprocal services
which elicit the feeling of mutual dependence, and thus
promote the recognition by one man of another as an
'alter ego,' would be possible without different limitations
of function and ability, which determine the range within
which each man's personality developes, in other words, the
scope of his personal interests.
Thus, under any conditions possible, so far as can be
seen, for human society, one man who was the best that
his position allowed, would be very different from another
who was the best that his position allowed. But, in order
that either may be good at all in the moral sense, i. e.
intrinsically and not merely as a means — in order that the
idea of the human spirit may be in any sense fulfilled in
him — the fulfilment of that idea in some form or other, the
contribution to human perfection in some way or other,
must be the object in which he seeks self-satisfaction, the
object for which he lives in living for himself. And it is
only so far as this development and direction of personality
is obtained for all who are capable of it (as presumably every
one who says ' I ' is capable), that human society, either in
its widest comprehension or in any of its particular groups,
can be held to fulfil its function, to realise its idea as it is
in God.
B. The Formal Character of the Moral Ideal or Law.
192. Having thus endeavoured to explain the relation in
which the development of the human race must stand to the
personal perfection of individuals, we return to the problem
CH. Il] CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MORAL IDEAL 221
which was postponed to make way for that explanation.
We have seen how there is a real identity between the end
for which the good man consciously lives — the end of
fulfilling in some way his rational capacity, or the idea of a
best that is in him — and the end to which human develop-
ment, if there is such a thing, must be eternally relative in
the eternal mind. It may be no more than such an identity
as there is between the mere consciousness that there is an
object and the consciousness what the object is. More
precisely, it may be no more than the identity between the
idea that a man has, in virtue of his rational capacity, of
something, he knows not what, which he may and should
become, and the idea, perfectly articulated and defined in
the divine consciousness, of a state of being in which the
capacities of all men are fully realised. But the idea as it
is in the individual man, however indefinite and unfilled,
is a communication in germ or principle of the idea as it is
in God, and the communication .is the medium through
which the idea as in God determines the progressive develop-
ment of human capacities in time. AHke as in God, as
communicated in principle to men, and as realising itself
by means of that communication in a certain development
of human capacities, the idea can have its being only in a
personal, i.e. a self-objectifying, consciousness. From the
mere idea in a man, however, ' of something, he knows not
what, which he may and should become,' to the actual
practice which is counted morally good, it may naturally
seem a long step. We have therefore to explain in further
detail how such an idea, gradually taking form and definite-
ness, has been the moralising agent in human life, yielding
our moral standards and inducing obedience to them.
193. Supposing such an idea to be operative in man,
what must be the manner of its operation? It will keep
before him an object, which he presents to himself as
absolutely desirable, but which is other than any particular
object of desire. Of this object it can never be possible
for him to give a sufificient account, because it consists in
222 \ MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. HI
the^ realisation of capabilities which can only be fully known
in their ultimate realisation. At the same time, because
it is the fulfilment of himself, of that which he has in him
to be, it will excite an interest in him like no other interest,
different in kind from any of his desires and aversions
except such as are derived from it. It will be an interest
as in an object conceived to be of unconditional value ; one
of which the value does not depend on any desire that the
individual may at any time feel for it or for anything else,
or on any pleasure that, either in its pursuit or in its attain-
ment or as its result, he may experience. The conception
of its desirableness will not arise, like the conception of the
desirableness of any pleasure, from previous enjoyment of
it or from reflection on the desire for it. On the contrary,
the desire for the object will be founded on a conception of
its desirableness as a fulfilment of the capabilities of which
a man is conscious in being conscious of himself.
In such men and at such times as a desire for it does
actually arise — a desire in that sense which implies that the
man puts himself forth for the realisation of the desired
object — it will express itself in their imposition on them-
selves of rules requiring something to be done irrespectively
of any inclination to do it, irrespectively of any desired end
to which it is a means, otAer than this end, which is desired
because conceived as absolutely desirable. With the men in
whom, and at the times when, there is no such desire, the
consciousness of there being something absolutely desirable
will still be a qualifying element in life. It will yield a
recognition of those unconditional rules of conduct to which,
from the prevalence of unconformable passions, it fails to
produce actual obedience. It will give meaning to the
demand, without which there is no morality and in which
all morality is virtually involved, that ' something be done
merely for the sake of its being done V because it is a con-
' ' So gewiss der Mensch ein Mensch ist, so gewiss Sussert sich in
ihm eine ZunOthigung, einiges ganz unabhSngig von gusseren
Zwecken zu thun, lediglich damit es geschehe, und andres eben so zu
unterlassen, lediglich damit es unterbleibe.' — ^J. G. Fichte.
CH. Il] CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MORAL IDEAL 223
sciousness of the possibility of an action in which no desire
shall be gratified but the desire excited by the idea of the
act itself, as of something absolutely desirable in the sense
that in it the man does the best that he has in him to do.
194. But, granted the conception of an unconditional
good for man, with unconditional rules of conduct which
it suggests, what in particular will those rules enjoin ? We
have said that man can never give a sufficient account of
what his unconditional good is, because he cannot know
what his capabilities are till they are realised. This is the
explanation of the infirmity that has always been found to
attach to attempted definitions of the moral ideal. They
are always open to the" charge that there is employed in
the definition, openly or disguisedly, the very notion which
profession is made of defining. If, on being asked for an
account of the unconditional good, we answer either that it
is the good will or that to which the good will is directed,
we are naturally asked further, what then is the good will ?
And if in answer to this question we can only say that it is
the will for the unconditional good, we are no less naturally
charged with 'moving in a circle.' We do but slightly
disguise the circular process without escaping from it if,
instead of saying directly that the good will is the will for
the unconditional good, we say that it is the will to conform
to a universal law for its own sake or because it is conceived
as a universal law ; for the recognition of the authority of
such a universal law must be founded on the conception
of its relation to an unconditional good.
It is one of the attractions of Hedonistic Utilitarianism
that it seems to avoid this logical embarrassment. If we
say that the unconditional good is pleasure, and that the
good will is that which in its effects turns out to produce
most pleasure on the whole, we are certainly not chargeable
with assuming in either definition the idea to be defined.
We are not at once explaining the unconditional good by
reference to the good will, and the good will by reference
to the unconditional good. But we only avoid doing so by
224 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
taking the good will to be relative to something external to
itself; to have its value only as a means to an end wholly
alien to, and different from, goodness itself. Upon this
jview the perfect man would not be an end in himself;
la perfect society of men would not be an end in itself.
Man or society would alike be only perfect in relation to
the production of feelings which are felt, with whatever
differences of quantity, by good men and bad, by man and
brute, indifferently. By such a theory we do not avoid the
logical embarrassment attending the definition of a moral
ideal ; for it is not a moral ideal, in the sense naturally
attached to that phrase, that we are defining at all. By
a moral ideal we mean some type of man or character or
personal activity, considered as an end in itself. But, ac-
cording to the theory of Hedonistic Utilitarianism, no such
type of man or character or personal activity is an end in
itself at all.
195. It may not follow that the theory is false on this
account. That is a point which would have to be con-
sidered in a full critical discussion of Hedonism. What
has to be noticed here is that such a theory is not available
for our purpose. It affords no help when once we have
convinced ourselves that man can only be an end to
himself; that consequently it is only in himself as he may
become, in a complete realisation of what he has it in him
to be, in his perfect character, that he can find satisfaction ;
that in this therefore alone can lie his unconditional good.
When we are seeking for a definition of the moral ideal in
accordance with this view, we should be aware what we are
about. It is as well to confess at once that, when we are
giving an account of an agent whose development is governed
by an ideal of his own perfection, we cannot avoid speaking
of one and the same condition of will alternately as means
and as end. The goodness of the will or man as a means
must be described as lying in direction to that same good-
ness as an end. For the end is that full self-conscious
realisation of capabilities to which the means lies in the self-
CH. Il] CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MORAL WEAL 225
conscious exercise of the same capabilities — an exercise of
them in imperfect realisation, but under the governing idea
of the desirability of their fuller realisation. If we had know-
ledge of what their fuller realisation would be, we might so
describe it as to distinguish it from that exercise of them in
less complete development which is the means to that full
realisation. We might thus distinguish the perfection of
man as end from his goodness as means to the end, though
the perfection would be in principle identical with the good-
ness, differing from it only as the complete from the incom-
plete. But we have no such knowledge of the full realisation. .
We know it only according to the measure of what we have
so far done or are doing for its attainment. And this is to
say that we have no knowledge of the perfection of man as
the unconditional good, but that which we have of his good-
ness or the good will, in the form which it has assumed as
a means to, or in the effort after, the unconditional good ;
a good which is not an object of speculative knowledge to
man, but of which the idea — the conviction of there being
such a thing — is the influence through which his life is
directed to its attainment.
196. It is therefore not an illogical procedure, because it
is the only procedure suited to the matter in hand, to say
that the goodness of man lies in devotion to the ideal of
humanity, and then that the ideal of humanity consists in
the goodness of man. It means that such an ideal, not yet
realised but operating as a motive, already constitutes in
man an inchoate form of that life, that perfect development
of himself, of which the completion would be the realised
ideal itself. Now in relation to a nature such as ours, having
other impulses than those which draw to the ideal, this ideal
becomes, in Kant's language, an imperative, and a categorical
imperative. It will command something to be done univer-
sally and unconditionally, irrespectively of whether there is
in any one, at any time, an inclination to do it. But when
we ask ourselves what it is that this imperative commands
to be done, we are met with just the same difficulty as when
Q
1226 MORAL WEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. Ill
-asked to define the moral ideal or the unconditional good.
jWe can only say that the categorical imperative commands
' us to obey the categorical imperative, and to obey it for its
own sake. If — not merely for practical purposes but as a
matter of speculative certainty — we identify its injunction
with any particular duty, circumstances will be found upon
which the bindingness of that duty is contingent, and the
too hasty identification of the categorical imperative with it
will issue in a suspicion that, after all, there is no categorical
imperative, no absolute duty, at all. After the explanations
just given, however, we need not shrink from asserting as
the basis of morality an unconditional duty, which yet is
not a duty to do anything unconditionally except to fulfil
that unconditional duty. It is the duty of realising an ideal
I ^^l?i£lLP^!i?P*^ kS adequately defined till it is realised, and
which, when realised, would no longer present itself as a
i source of duties, because the should be would be exchanged
for the is. This is the unconditional ground of those parti-
cular duties to do or to forbear doing, which in the effort of
the social man to realise his ideal have so far come to be
recognised as binding, but which are each in some way or
other conditional, because relative to particular circum-
stances, however wide the range of circumstances may be
to which they are relative;
197. At the same time, then, that the categorical impera-
tive can enjoin nothing ivithout liability to exception but
disinterested obedience to itself, it will have no lack of
definite content. The particular duties which it enjoins
will at least be all those in the practice of which, according
to the hitherto experience of men, some progress is made
towards the fulfilment of man's capabilities, or some con-
dition necessary to that progress is satisfied. We say it will
enjoin these at least, because particular duties must be
constantly arising out of it for the individual, for which no
formula can be found before they arise, and which are thus
extraneous to the recognised code. Every one, however, of
the duties which the law of the state or the law of opinion
CH.Il] CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MORAL IDEAL 227
recognises must in some way be relative to circumstances.
The rule therefore in which it is conveyed, though stated
in the most general terms compatible with real significance,
must still admit of exceptions. Yet is there a true sense in
which the whole system of such duties is unconditionally
binding. It is so as an expression of the absolute imperative
to seek the absolutely desirable, the ideal of humanity, the
fulfilment of man's vocation. Because an expression (though
an incomplete one) of this absolute imperative, because a
product of the effort after such an unconditional good, the
requirements of conventional morality, however liable they
may be to exceptions, arising out of circumstances other
than those to which they are properly applicable, are at^ least
liable to no excgjjtion for the sake of the inHividual's plea-
sure^As against any desire but some form or other of that
desire for the best in conduct, which will, no doubt, from
time to time suggest new duties in seeming conflict with the
old — against any desire for this or that pleasure, or any
aversion from this or that pain — they are unconditionally
binding.
198. Upon this view, so far from the Categorical Impera- 1
tive having no particular content, it may rather seem to have
too much. It enjoins observance of the whole complex of
established duties, as a means to that perfection of man of
which it unconditionally enjoins the pursuit. And it enjoins
this observance as unconditionally as it enjoins the pursuit
of the end to which this observance is a means, so long as it
is suck a means. It will only allow such a departure from it
in the interest of a fuller attainment of the unconditional
end, not in the interest of any one's pleasure. The ques-
tion indeed is sure to suggest itself, what available criterion
such a doctrine affords us, either for distinguishing the es-
sential from the unessential in the requirements of law and
custom, or for the discernment of duty in cases to which no
recognised rule is applicable. So far as it can be translated
into practice at all, must not its effect be either a dead con-
formity to the code of customary morality, anywhere and at
Q 2
228 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS
any time established, without effort to reform or expand it,
or else unlimited license in departing from it at the prompt-
ing of any impulse which the individual may be pleased to
consider a higher law ? These questions shall be con-
sidered in due course ' ; but before we enquire into the
practical bearings of our doctrine as to the relation between
the system of duties anywhere recognised and the uncon-
ditional ground of all duties — before we ask how it affects
our criteria of what in particular we should do or not do —
we have further to make good the doctrine itself. We have
to revert to the question, still left unanswered, how the
mere idea of something absolutely desirable — an idea which,
' we confess, does not primarily enable us to say anything of
, its object but that, there must be such a thing — should have
gradually defined itself, shouldhave taken body and content,
in the establishment of recognised duties, in the formation
of actual virtues, among men.
1 [See Book IV.]
CHAPTER III
THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE MORAL IDEAL.
A. Reason as Source of the Idea of a Common Good.
199. That an idea of something absolutely desira:ble, which
we cannot identify with any particular object of desire with-
out soon discovering our mistake in the dissatisfaction which
ensues upon the attainment of the particular object — that
such an idea of a supreme good, which is no good thing in
particular, should express itself in a system of social require-
ments and expectations, of which each would seem to have
reference to a definite social need, may naturally at first be
thought an extravagant supposition. Further consideration,
however, may change our view. The idea of the absolutely!
desirable; as we have seen, arises out of, or rather is identical
with, man's consciousness of himself as an end to himself.;
It is the forecast, proper to a subject conscious at once of
himself as an absolute end, and of a life of becoming, of
constant transition from possibility to realisation, and from
this again to a new possibility — a forecast of a well-being that
shall consist in the complete fulfilment of himself. Now the
self of which a man thus forecasts the fulfilment, is not an
abstract or empty self. It is a self already affected in the
most primitive forms of human life by manifold interests,
among which are interests in other persons. These are not
merely interests dependent on other persons for the means
to their gratification, but interests in the good of those other
persons, interests which cannot be satisfied without the
consciousness that those other persons are satisfied. The
man cannot contemplate himself as in a better state, or on the
way to the best, without contemplating others, not merely as
a means to that better state, but as sharing it with him.
200. It may seem unphilosophical now-a-days to accept
230 MORAL WEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
this distinctive social interest on our part as a primary fact,
without attempting to account for it by any process of
evolution. Any history indeed that might be offered of it,
which should enable us to connect its more complex with
its simpler forms, would be much to be welcomed. But
the same could not be said for a history which should seem
to account for it by ignoring its distinctive character, and by
deriving it from forms of animal sympathy from which,
because they have no element of identity with it, it cannot
in the proper sense have been developed. What the real
nature may be of the sympathy of the higher animals with
each other, we have probably no means of knowing. If
it is merely an excitement of pleasure or pain in one animal,
upon sign of pleasure or pain being given by another; if it
is merely an impulse on the part of one animal to act so as
to give pleasure to another, with whose pleasure its own is
thus associated; then what we know as the social interest
of men is more and other than a development of it. For it
is characteristic of this interest that, to the man who is the
subject of it, those who are its objects are ends, in the same
sense in which he is an end to himself. Or, more properly,
they are included in the end for which he lives in living for
himself. The feeling of pleasure or pain in response to
manifested pleasure or pain on the part of another sentient
being does not contain the germ of such an interest, unless
the subject of the feeling is conscious of himself as other
than the feeling which he experiences, and of the agent
occasioning it as an 'alter ego.' Only on that condition
can desire for a renewal of the pleasure become, or give
place to, desire for a good, to be shared by the person
desiring it with another whose good is as his own.
However dependent therefore the social interest, as we
know it, may be upon feelings of animal origin, such as
sexual feelings, or feelings of want in the offspring which only
the parent can supply, it is not a product of those feelings,
not evolved from them. In order to issue in it they must
have taken a new character, as feelings of one who can and
CH.ni] DEVELOPMENT OF THE MORAL IDEAL 231
does present to himself a good of himself as an end in dis-
tinction from any particular pleasure, and a like good of
another or others as included in that end. To ignore the
distinctive character which our sympathies thus derive, and
must have derived in any being to whom we can reasonably
affiliate ourselves, from the action of a self-objectifying con-
sciousness, is as misleading an abstraction from the reality
of human nature as it would be, on the other hand, to
separate that consciousness from those sympathies and in-
terests, without which the formal idea in a man of a possible
better state of himself would have no actual filling.
201. We may take it, then, as an ultimate fact of human
history — a fact without which there would not be such a
history, and which is not in turn deducible from any other
history — that out of sympathies of animal origin, through
their presence in a self-conscious soul, there arise interests
as of a person in persons. Out of processes common to
man's life with the life of animals there arise for man, as
there do not apparently arise for animals,
Relations dear and all the charities
Of father, son, and brother :
and of those relations and charities self-consciousness on the
part of all concerned in them is the condition. At the risk
of provoking a charge of pedantry, this point must be insisted
on. It is not any mere sympathy with pleasure and pain
that can by itself yield the affections and recognised obliga-
tions of the family. The man for whom they are to be
possible must be able, through consciousness of himself as an
end to himself, to enter into a like consciousness as belonging
to others, whose expression of it corresponds to his own.
He must have practical understanding of what is meant for
them, as for himself, by saying ' I.' Having found his
pleasures and pains dependent on the pleasures and pains
of others, he must be able in the contemplation of a possible
satisfaction of himself to include the satisfaction of those
others, and that a satisfaction of them as ends to themselves
and not as means to his pleasure. He must, in short, be !
232 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk.IH
capable of conceiving and seeking a permanent well-being in
which the permanent well-being of others is included.
202. Some sort of community, founded on such unity of
self-consciousness, on such capacity for a common idea of
permanent good, must be presupposed in any groupings of
men from which the society that we know can have been
developed. To the man living under its influence the idea
of the absolutely desirable, the effort to better himself, must
from the first express itself in some form of social require-
ment. So far as he is set on making his way to some
further fulfilment of himself, he must seek to carry those in
whom he is interested with him in the process. That ' better
reason" which, in antagonism to the incHnations of the
moment, presents itself to him as a law for himself, will
present itself to him as equally a law for them ; and as a law
for them on the same ground and in the same sense as it is
a law for him, viz. as prescribing means to the fulfilment of
an idea of absolute good, common to him with them — an
idea indefinable indeed in imagination, but gradually defin-
ing itself in act.
The conception of a moral law, in its strict philosophical
form, is no doubt an analogical adaptation of the notion of
law in the more primary sense — the notion of it as a com-
mand enforced by a political superior, or by some power to
which obedience is habitually rendered by those to whom
the command is addressed. But there is an idea which
equally underlies the conception both of moral duty and of
legal right; which is prior, so to speak, to the distinction
between them ; which must have been at work in the minds
of men before they could be capable of recognising any
kind of action as one that ought to be done, whether because
it is enjoined by law or authoritative custom, or because,
though not thus enjoined, a man owes it to himself or to his
neighbour or to God. This is the idea of an absolute and
a common good ; a good common to the person conceiving
it with others, and good for him and them, whether at any
^ See above, § 179.
CH. Ill] DEVELOPMENT OF THE MORAL IDEAL 233
moment it answers their likings or no. As affected by such
an idea, a man's attitude to his likes and dislikes will be one
of which, in his inward converse, the ' Thou shalt ' or ' Thou
must ' of command is the natural expression, though of law,
in the sense either of' the command of a political superior
or of a self-imposed rule of life, he may as yet have no
definite conception.
And so affected by it he must be, before the authority
either of custom or of law can have any meaning for him.
Simple fear cannot constitute the sense of such authority
nor by any process of development, properly so called, be-
come it. It can only spring from a conviction, on the part
of those recognising the authority, that a good which is really
their good, though in constant conflict with their inclinations,
is really served by the power in which they recognise authority.
Whatever force may be employed in maintaining custom or
law, however ' the interest of the stronger,' whether an in-
dividual or the few or the majority of Some group of people,
may be concerned in maintaining it, only some persuasion of
its contribution to a recognised common good can yield that
sort of obedience to it which, equally in the simpler and the
more complex stages of society, forms the social bond.
203. The idea, then, of a possible well-being of himself,
that shall not pass away with this, that, or the other plea-
sure ; and relation to some group of persons whose well-
being he takes to be as his own, and in whom he is inter-
ested in being interested in himself — these two things must
condition the life of any one who is to be a creator or sus-
tainer either of law or of that prior authoritative custom out
of which law arises. Without them there might be instru-
ments of law and custom ; intelligent co-operating subjects
of law and custom there could not be. They are conditions ,
at once of might being so exercised that it can be recognised
as having right, and of that recognition itself. It is in this
sense that the old language is justified, which speaks of Rea-
son as the parent of Law. Reason is the self-objectifying
consciousness. It constitutes, as we have seen, the capa-
234 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
1 bility in man of seeking an absolute good and of conceiving
this good as common to others with himself: and it is this
capability which alone renders him a possible author and a
' self-submitting subject of law.
In saying this we are saying nothing for or against any
theory of the conditions under which, as a matter of history,
laws may have been first established. It is easy, and for
certain purposes may be advisable, to define a sense of the
term in which ' laws ' do not exist till an advanced stage of
civilisation, when sovereignties of ascertained range and
scope have been established, and when the will of the
sovereign has come to be expressed in general and per-
manent forms. In proportion as we thus restrict our usage
of the term ' law ' we shall have to extend our view of the
effect upon human life of social requirements, which are
not ' laws,' but to which the good citizen renders an obe-
dience the same in principle as that which he renders to
' laws ' ; an obedience at once willing and constrained —
willing, because recognised as the condition of a social
jgood, which is his own highest good; constrained, in so far
(as it prevents him from doing what he would otherwise like
I to do. It is with the ground of this obedience that the
1 moralist is concerned, as having been rendered when as yet
' law ' in the restricted sense was not, and as still rendered
equally by the good citizen to the law which the state
enforces, and to that of which the sanction is a social
sentiment shared by him.
\ 204. This ground the moralist finds in Reason, according
|to the sense explained. He will listen respectfully to any
account, for which historians can claim probability, of the
courses of events by which powers, strong enough to enforce
general obedience, have been gathered into the hands of
individuals or groups of men; but he will reflect that,
though the exercise of force may be a necessary incident in
the maintenance of government, it cannot of itself produce
' the state of mind on which social union in any of its forms
depends. He will listen, further, to all that the anthro-
CH. m] DEVELOPMENT OF THE MORAL IDEAL 235
pologist can tell him of the earliest forms in which such
union can be traced ; but here again he will reflect that,
when the phenomena of some primitive usage have been
duly established, the interpretation of the state of mind
which they repiresent is a further question, and one that
cannot be answered without reference to the developed
consciousness which is ours. When the anthropologist has
gathered all the results he can from a collation of the sayings
and doings of such uncivilised people as can now be observ-
ed, with records and survivals from the lives of our ancestors,
his clue for the interpretation of his material will depend in
the last resort on his analysis of that world of feeling, thought,
and desire, in which he himself lives. Unless the fragmentary
indications obtainable of the life of primitive humanity can
be interpreted as expressing a consciousness in germ or prin-
ciple the same as ours, we have no clue to their inner signi-
ficance at all. They are at best no more to us than the
gestures of animals, from which we may conjecture that the
animal is pleased or pained, but by which no consciousness
in its intrinsic nature is conveyed to us, as it is conveyed in
the speech of another man. We may, of course, take this
view of them. We may hold that no inference is possible
from them to any state of mind on the part of primitive man.
But we cannot interpret them as expressing a state of mind
without founding our conception of the state of mind on our
own consciousness. Even if it were possible on any other
plan to read a state of mind in them at all, we certainly could
not read in them a consciousness from which our own has
been developed, without assuming an identity, under what-
ever variety of modification, between the less and the more
developed consciousness.
Thus, though our information about primitive man were
very different from what it is, it could never be other than
a contradiction to found upon it a theory of the state of mind
underlying the earliest forms of social union, which should
represent this state of mind as different in kind from that
which, upon fair analysis of the spiritual life now shared by
236 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
us, we find to be the condition of such social union as
actually exists. If we are right in ascribing to Reason a
I function of union in the life that we know ; if we are right in
holding that through it we are conscious of ourselves, and of
others as ourselves, — through it accordingly that we can seek
to make the best of ourselves and of others with ourselves,
and that in this sense Reason is the basis of society, because
the source at once of the establishment of equal practical
rules in a common interest, and of self-imposed subjection
; to those rules ; then we are entitled to hold that Reason
. fulfilled a function intrinsically the same in the most primi-
jtive associations of man with man, between which and the
actual institutions of family and commune, of state and na-
i tion, there has been any continuity of development.
205. The foundation of morality, then, in the reason or
self-objectifying consciousness of man^ is the same thing as
its foundation in the institutions of a common Ufe— in these
as directed to a common good, and so directed not mechani-
cally but with consciousness of the good on the part of those
subject to the institutions. Such institutions are, so to speak,
the form and body of reason, as practical in men. Without
them the rational or self-conscious or moral man does not
exist, nor without them can any being have existed from
whom such a man could be developed, if any continuity of
nature is implied in development. No development of mor-
ality can be conceived, nor can any history of it be traced
(for that would imply such a conception), which does not
presuppose some idea of a common good, expressing itself
in some elementary effort after a regulation of life. Without
such an idea the development would be as impossible as it
is impossible that sight should be generated when there is no
optic nerve. With it, however restricted in range the idea
may be, there is given ' in promise and potency ' the ideal of
which the realisation would be perfect morality, the ideal of
a society in which every one shall treat every one else as his
neighbour, in which to every rational agent the well-being or
perfection of every other such agent shall be included in that
CH. m] DUTY TO HUMANITY
237
perfection of himself for which he lives. And as the most
elementary notion in a rational being of a personal good,
common to himself with another who is as himself, is in
possibility such an ideal^ so the most primitive institutions
for the regulation of a society with reference to a common
good are already a school for the character which shall be
responsive to the moral ideal.
It has become a common-place among us that the moral
susceptibilities which we find in ourselves, would not exist
but for the action of law and authoritative custom on many
generations of our ancestors. The common-place is doubt-
less perfectly true. It is only misleading when we overlook
the rational capacities implied in the origin and maintenance
of such law and custom. The most elementary moralisation
of the individual must always have arisen from his finding
himself in the presence of a requirement, enforced against
his inclinations to pleasure, but in an interest which he can
recognise as being his own, no less than the interest of those
by whom the requirement is enforced. The recognition of
such an interest by the individual is an outcome of the same
reason as that which has led to the maintenance of the
requirement by the society he belongs to. All further
development of morality^all articulation of duties, all
education of conscience in response to them — presupposes
this primary recognition. Of the principal movements into
which the development may be analysed we shall now go on
to speak in more detail, only premising that the necessity of
describing them separately should not lead us to forget that
they are mutually involved.
B. T^e Extension of the Area of Common Good.
206. The first of the movements into which the develop-
ment of morality may be analysed consists in a gradual ex-
tension, for the mental eye of the moral subject, of the range
of persons to whom the common good is conceived as
common; towards whom and between whom accordingly
obligations are understood to exist. What may have been
238 MORAL WEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
the narrowest restrictions on this range within which the
process of moralisation has gone on, we have no means of
saying. We only know that the earliest ascertainable history
exhibits to us communities, relatively very confined, within
any one of which a common good, and in consequence a
common duty, is recognised as between the members of the
community, while beyond the particular community the
range of mutual obligation is not understood to extend.
Among ourselves, on the contrary, it is almost an axiom of
popular Ethics that there is at least a potential duty of every
man to every man — a duty which becomes actual so soon as
one comes to have any dealing with the other. It is true
that plenty of pretexts, some under very philosophical dis-
guise, are always forthcoming when it is wished to evade the
duty ; but, when we are free from private bias, we do not
seriously dispute its validity. Conscience is uneasy at its
violation, as it would not have been, according to all indi-
cations, in the case, let us say, of a Greek who used his slave
as a chattel, though according to his lights the Greek might
be as conscientious as any of us. Yet the language in which
we most naturally express our conception of the duty of all
men to all men indicates the school — that of tribal, or civil,
or family obligation — in which we have been trained to the
conception. We convey it in the concrete by speaking of
a human family, of a fraternity of all men, of the common
fatherhood of God ; or we suppose a universal Christian
citizenship, as wide as the Humanity for which Christ died,
and in thought we transfer to this, under certain analogical
adaptations, those claims of one citizen upon another which
have been actually enforced in societies united under a single
sovereignty.
207. It is not uncommon indeed with men to whom
a little philosophy has proved a dangerous thing, to make
much of the distinction between an obligation that admits
of being enforced between persons subject to a common
sovereign, and what is alleged to be due from man to man,
as such ; to extenuate the claims of humanity, and even to
CH. Ill] DUTY TO HUMANITY ' 239
make merry over the fraternity of men and nations. The
distinction is easily drawn, and, so long as there continue
to be men who will not observe obligations unless enforced,
it cannot be considered practically unimportant. But for
the moralist it is more important to observe the real fusion,
in the conscience of those citizens of the modern world
who are most responsive to the higher influences of their
time, of duties enforced by legal penalties and those of
which the fulfilment cannot be exacted by citizen of citizen,
or by sovereign of subjects, but is felt to be due from man
to man. It is not more certain that a man would not
recognise a duty, e.g. of educating his poor neighbours or
helping to liberate a slave, unless, generations before him,
equal rights had been enforced among men who could not
have understood the wrong of slavery or the claim of the
labourer to a chance of raising himself, than that there are
men now to whom such duties present themselves with just
the same cogency as legal obligations ; men to whom the
motive for fulfilling the latter has been so entirely purged
from any fear of penalties, that the absence of such fear, as
a motive to the fulfilment of humanitarian duties, makes no
difference to the felt necessity of fulfiUing them.
No gradual modification of selfish fear or hope could
yield a disposition of this kind ; and if these were the sole
original motives to civil or tribal or family obedience, it
would be unintelligible that a state of mind should result,
in which a man imposes duties on himself quite beyond the
range of such obedience. But if at the root of such obe-
dience, as well as of the institutions to which it has been
rendered, there has been an idea of good, suggested by the
consciousness of unfulfilled possibilities of the rational nature
common to all men, then it is intelligible that, as the range
of this idea extends itself— as it comes to be understood that
no race or religion or status is a bar to self determined co-
operation in its fulfilment — the sense of duty which it yields,
and which has gained its power over natural desires and
aversions through generations of discipline in the family and
240 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
the state, should become a sense of what is due to man as
such, and not merely to the members of a particular com-
munity. The change is not necessarily in the strength, in
the constraining power, of the feeling of duty — perhaps it is
never stronger now than it may have been in an Israelite
who would have yet recognised no claim in a Philistine, or
in a Greek who would yet have seen no harm in exposing
a sickly child — but in the conceived range of claims to which
the duty is relative. Persons come to be recognised as having
claims who would once not have been recognised as having
any claim, and the claim of the "o-ot Koi o/ioiot comes to be
admitted where only the claim of indulged inferiors would
have been allowed before. It is not the sense of duty to a
neighbour, but the practical answer to the question Who is
my neighbour ? that has varied.
208. The extension of this process has indeed often been
looked on with suspicion by practical men. It has been
suggested that the friend of man is apt to be the friend of
no one in particular. 'Enthusiasm for humanity' is thought
to interfere with the ties of country and fellow-citizenship,
without putting any influence in their place which can be
relied on for controlling the selfish inclinations of the
individual. The suspicion is probably groundless. The
excuses which selfishness makes for itself in the mouths of
cultivated men will, no doubt, vary according to the philo-
sophical tendencies of the time ; and it would be hard to
deny that it may take advantage of a cant of Humanita-
rianism, as of any other cant that may be in vogue. But if
this illustrates the old lesson — too familiar to need illustra-
tion— that there are no intellectual formulae of which the
adoption will serve as a substitute for discipline of character,
it argues nothing against the view that, given the discipline
of character by which alone our selfish or pleasure-seeking
tendencies can be controlled or superseded, the practical
value of a man's morality increases with the removal of
limitations upon his view of the kind of humanity which
constitutes a claim equal with his own. If the fundamental
CH. Mr] bUTY TO tiUMANlty 241
readiness to forgo pleasure for duty cannot be produced
merely by a wider view of the claims which others have on
us, it can scarcely suffer from such a view. Indeed, if habit
is strengthened by exercise, it would seem that the habit on
which the fulfilment of known duties depends, once partially
formed, must be strengthened rather than otherwise by that
more constant call for the practice of duty which naturally
arises from recognition of a wider range of persons to whom
duties are due. Self-indulgent tendencies which often tend
to revive, as life goes on, in those who have mastered them-
selves enough for ' respectability,' but to whom the range of
duties implied in respectability is a narrow one, will be
more constantly challenged by situations in which unfamiliar
duties have to be met. And if the dutiful disposition must
thus gain rather than lose in strength from the enlighten-
ment before which the exclusive dependence of moral claims
on relations of family, status, or citizenship disappears, it
would seem that with this disappearance its effect in further-
ing the social realisation of human capabilities must greatly
increase. Faculties which social repression and separation
prevent from development, take new life from the enlarged
co-operation which the recognition of equal claims in all
men brings with it. Nor is it the case, as we are apt to
suppose, that the gain in this respect is confined merely to
the majority, while the few favoured by the system of
privileged status and national antagonism proportionately
lose. We only imagine this to be the case from a mislead-
ing association of greater capability with more distinctive
supremacy. The special qualities of command are, no doubt,
less highly developed as the idea of the brotherhood of men
comes to be more fully carried out in the institutions of the
world, but meanwhile the capabilities implied in social self-
adjustment become what they could not be before. If we
admire these capabilities less than the qualities of command,
it is perhaps because we have not adjusted our admirations
to what we must yet admit to be the divine plan of man's
development.
242 MORAL IDEAL AND M6RAt PROGRESS [BK.IU
209. The very possibility, however, of raising the ques-
tion whether men are really the better for the acceptaiice of
humanitarian ideas, indicates the extent of their actual cur-
rency. Their influence may be traced alike in the positive
lawSj and institutions maintained by law, of civilised nations ;
in the law of opinion, the social sentiments and expectations,
prevalent among them ; and in the formulae by which philo-
sophers have sought to methodise this law of opinion. It
would be superfluous here to follow in detail the process by
which the law of Christendom has gradually come to conform
to the ' Jus naturale ' already recognised by Ulpian and the
Institutes, according to which 'omnes homines aequales
sunt.' Nor is it to the purpose to discuss the share which
Stoic philosophers, Roman jurists, and Christian teachers
may severally have had in gaining acceptance for the idea of
human equality. It is only some spirit of partisanship that
can lead us to put one set of teachers or institutions into
competition with another for the credit of having contributed
most to what, after all, is but the natural fulfillment of a capa-
bility given in reason itself— a fulfilment which only special
selfish interests can withstand. Given the idea of a common
good and of self-determined participators in it — the idea
implied, as we have seen, in the most primitive human
society — the tendency of the idea in the minds of all capable
of it must be to include, as participators of the good, all who
have dealings with each other and who can communicate as
' I ' and ' Thou.' With growing means of intercourse and
the progress of reflection the theory of a universal human
fellowship is its natural outcome. It is rather the retarda-
tion of the acceptance of the theory that the historian has to
explain ; its retardation by those private interests which have
made it inconvenient for powerful men and classes to act
upon it, and have led them to welcome any counter-theory
which might justify their practice ; such, e.g., as the interests
which led some of the American communities, after claiming
their own independence on the ground that 'all men are
born free and equal,' to vindicate negro slavery for nearly
CH. ni] DUTY TO HUMANITY 243
a hundred years and only to relinquish it after a tremendous
war in its defence.
210. However retarded, equality before the law has at
length been secured, at least ostensibly, for all full-grown
and sane human beings throughout Christendom. Under
ordinary circumstances the right to free movement, and to
the free enjoyment and disposal of the fruits of his labour,
is guaranteed to every one, on condition of his respecting
the like freedom in others. Social sentiment not merely
responds to the requirements of law in this respect and
secures their general observance, but often demands, on the
ground of a common humanity, some positive contribution
to the service of others where law can merely prevent a vio-
lation of rights, and some abatement from the strict exaction
of a claim which law sanctions. It would almost every-
where condemn the refusal of help to a man, however alien
in blood, language and religion, whose life depended on the
help being given him, or the exaction of a debt legally due
at the cost of the debtor's starvation. The necessities of
war indeed are treated as practically suspending the claims
of a common humanity. The processes by which the general
conscience reconciles itself to their so doing cannot be con-
sidered here ; but the fact that it is only when in conflict
with the apparent claims of a common country that the
claims of a common humanity are thought to be superseded,
shows what a strong hold the latter have obtained on social
sentiment.
211. For an abstract expression of the notion that there
is something due from every man to every man, simply as
men, we may avail ourselves of the phrase employed in the
famous definition of Justice in the Institutes : — ' Justitia est
constans et perpetua voluntas suum cuique tribuendi.'
Every man both by law and common sentiment is recog-
nised as having a 'suum,' whatever the 'suum' may be, and
is thus efiFectually distinguished from the animals (at any
rate according to our treatment of them) and from things.
He is deemed capable of having something of his own, as
R 3
244 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
animals and things are not. He is treated as an end, not
merely as a means. It is obvious indeed that the notion
expressed by the ' suum cuique,' even when it carries with
it the admission that every man, as such, has a ' suum,' is
a most insufficient guide to conduct till we can answer the
question what the ' suum ' in each case is, and that no such
answer is deducible from the mere principle that every one
has a 'suum.' In fact, of course, this principle is never
wrought into law or general sentiment without very precise,
though perhaps insufficient and ultimately untenable, deter-
minations of what is due from one to another in the ordinary
intercourse of those habitually associated. Particular duties
to this man and that have been recognised long before
reflection has reached the stage in which a duty to man as
such can be recognised. How far upon reflection we can
find in these particular duties — in the detail of conventional
morality — a permanent and universal basis for right conduct,
is a separate question. For the present we wish to follow
out the effect exerted upon the responsive conscience by life
in a society where a capacity for rights, some claim on his
fellow-men, has come to be ascribed to every man. Given
that readiness to recognise a duty and to act upon the
recognition, which is the proper outcome in the individual
of family and civil discipline as governed by an idea of
common good, what sort of rule of conduct will the indivi-
dual, upon unbiassed reflection, obtain for himself from the
establishment in law and general sentiment of the principle
that every man can claim something as his due ? How will
it tend to define for him the absolutely desirable, and the
ideal of conduct as directed thereto ?
212. The great result will be to fix it in his mind, as
a condition of such conduct, that it should be alike foi; the
real good of all men concerned in or affected by it, as
estimated on the same principle. This rule has indeed
become so familiarised to our consciences, however fre-
quently we violate it, that at first sight it may seem to
some too trivial to be worthy a philosopher's attention.
CH. Ill] DUTY TO HUMANITY 245
while by others it may be remarked that, till we have
decided what the real good of all men is, and have at least
some general knowledge of the effect upon it, under certain
conditions, of certain lines of conduct, the rule will not tell
us how we ought to act in particular cases. Such a remark
would be plainly true. For the present, however, we are
considering the importance to the conscientious man of
this recognition of a like claim in all men, taken simply by
itself, irrespectively of those criteria of the good and of those
convictions as to the means of arriving at it by which the
recognition is in fact always accompanied. It is the source
of the refinement in his sense of justice. It is that which
makes him so over-curious, as it seems to the ordinary man
of the world, in enquiring, as to any action that may suggest
itself to him, whether the benefit which he might gain by it
for himself or for some one in whom he is interested, would
be gained at the expense of any one else, however indiffer-
ent to him personally, however separated from him in family,
status, or nation. It makes the man, in short, who will be
just before he is generous ; who will not merely postpone his
own interest to his friend's, but who, before he gratifies an
' altruistic ' inclination, will be careful to enquire how in
doing so he would affect others who are not the object of
the inclination. This characteristic of the man who is just
in the full light of the idea of human equality is independ-
ent of any theory of well-being on his part. Whether he
has any theory on the matter at all, whether he is theo-
retically an ' Ascetic ' or a ' Hedonist,' makes little practical
difference. The essential thing is that he applies no other
standard in judging of the well-being of others than in
judging of his own, and that he will not promote his own
well-being or that of one whom he loves or likes, from whom
he has received service or expects it, at the cost of impeding
in any way the well-being of one who is nothing to him but
a man, or whom he involuntarily dislikes ; that he will not do
this knowingly, and that he is habitually on the look-out to
know whether his actions will have this effect or not.
246 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. Ill
Oh supposition that a man has really attained this habit
of practical justice, that it is his constant and uniform state,
he has in him at least the negative principle of all virtue ;
a principle that will effectually restrain him from doing all
that he ought not, if it does not move him to do all that he
ought. We cannot indeed be sure that it will prevent the
possibility of his doing acts which in the general result yield
more pain than pleasure. The most equitable intentions,
most carefully carried out, will not, for instance, save a man
from liability to do something, in ignorance of its conse-
quences, which will in fact promote a dangerous disease.
If however we do not speak of a man doing an action which
he ought not except in contemplation of his state of mind,
as at any rate intending consequences which he might have
known to be mischievous, then the man who is just in the
sense described will be safe from doing what he ought not. •
213. Such a man perhaps would not, even at this day
and in the most Christianised and civilised society, command
universal or very hearty admiration. Moral emotions have
not been so far wrought into accord with that principle of
right in man as man, which has been established in law and
recognised (though by no means in its full application) by
social opinion. There may indeed be a well-founded sus-
picion that the plea of justice before generosity is often rather
made an excuse for deficient generosity than a ground for
scrupulosity of justice. But, more than this, the duty of
treating all men equally, even to the extent of not serving
a friend or kinsman or countryman in a manner prejudicial
to any one else, though it would no longer be in words
denied, has yet little hold on the ' hearts ' even of educated
and respectable men. It has been for this reason, far more
than from its being founded on a Hedonistic psychology,
which in fact was common to it with nearly all the Moral
Philosophy of England, that Utilitarianism has encountered
so much popular dislike. The principle embodied in the
formula, that ' every one should count for one and no one
for more than one' in the calculation of felicific consequences,
CH. m] DUTY TO HUMANITY
247
has been the source at once of its real beneficence in the life
of modern society and of the resistance, far more formidable
than that of ' Ascetic ' philosophy, which it has met with.
It has been the source of its beneficence because, quite
independently of the identification of the highest good
with a greatest possible sum of pleasures— perhaps indeed,
as we shall see later on, inconsistently with that identifica-
tion— it has practically meant for Utilitarians that every
human person was to be deemed an end of absolute value,
as much entitled as any one else to have his well-being
taken account of in considering the justifiableness of an
action by which that well-being could be aff'ected. And it
is precisely this that has brought the Utilitarian into conflict
with every class-prejudice, with every form of family or
national pride, with the inveterate and well-reputed habit of
investing with a divine right the cause of the friend or the
party or the institution which happens to interest us most,
without reference to its bearings on the welfare of others
more remote from our sympathies.
214. For practical purposes the principle that, in the esti-
mate of the resulting happiness by which the value of an
action is, to be judged, ' every one should count for one and
no one for more than one,' yields very much the same
direction as that one of the formulae employed by Kant for
the statement of the Categorical Imperative, which has
probably always commended itself most to readers alive to
the best spirit of their time : — ' Act so as to treat humanity,
whether in your own person or in that of others, always as
an end, never merely as a means.' We say for practical
purposes, because, as strictly interpreted, the one by a Ben-
thamite, the other by a Kantist, the significance of the two
formulae is wholly different. The Benthamite would repu-
diate or pronounce unintelligible the notion of an absolute
value in the individual person. It is not every person, ac-
cording to him, but every pleasure, that is of value in itself;
and in accordance with this view he has to qualify the formula
we have been dwelling on, so as to empty it, if not of all
248 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [BK. Ill
practical significance, at any rate of the significance which
we have ascribed to it, and which has been the real guide
to the reforming Utilitarian.
Upon Hedonistic principles it will only be as ' supposed
equal in degree" that one person's happiness, t'.e. his experi-
ence of pleasure, is to count for as much as another's. Now
as the ascertainment of this equality in degree between the
happiness of one man and that of another is practically im-
possible, and as there is every reason to think that different
men are susceptible of pleasure in most different degrees, it
is hard to see how the formula, thus interpreted, can afford
any positive ground for that treatment of all men's happiness
as entitled to equal consideration, for which Utilitarians have
in practice been so laudably zealous. The most that could
be deduced from it would be some very general condemna-
tion of those fixed class-distinctions which, by interfering with
the free pursuit of pleasure on the part of unprivileged per-
sons, would seem to lessen the aggregate of pleasure resulting
on the whole. Under it a superior race or order could plead
strong justification, not indeed for causing useless pain to the
inferior, but for systematically postponing the inferior's claims
to happiness to its own. Certainly no absolute rule could be
founded on it, prohibiting all pursuit of happiness by orre man
which interferes with the happiness of another, or what we
commonly call the oppression of the weaker by the stronger ;
for, the stronger being presumably capable of pleasure in
higher degree, there could be nothing to show that the
quantity of pleasure resulting from the gain to the stronger
through the loss to the weaker was not greater than would
have been the quantity resulting if the claims of each had
been treated as equal. Instead of such a rule as that on
which Utilitarians have been among the forwardest to act —
'We that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak,
and not to please ourselves ' — we should be logically entitled
at most to a counsel of prudence, advising much circumspec-
tion on the part of the strong before he assumes that an
' See Mill's Utilitarianism, p. 93.
CH. Ill] DUTY TO HUMANITY 249
addition to his pleasure, which involves a subtraction from
the pleasure of the weak, would neutralise the subtraction
in the hedonistic calculus.
215. There is reason to hold, then, that Kant's formula
affords a better expression than does Bentham's, as inter-
preted according to Bentham's notion of the good, for the
rule on which the ideally just man seeks to act. That rule,
as we have seen, is one that such a man gathers for himself
from the lessons which law and conventional morality have
taught him. It is his fnav6p6a>iia vofiov, 5 iWdirii Sia TO KadoKov^,
his articulation, and application to the particulars of life, of
that principle of an absolute value in the human person as
such, of a like claim to consideration in all men, which is
imphed in the law and conventional morality of Christendom,
but of which the application in law is from the nature of the
case merely general and prohibitory, while its application in
conventional morality is in fact partial and inconsistent.
' The recognition of the claims of a common humanity ' is
a phrase that has become so familiar in modern ears that we
are apt to suspect it of being cant. Yet this very familiarity
is proof of the extent to which the idea represented by it has
affected law and institutions. The phrase is indeed cant in
the mouth of any one in whom there is no conscientious will
giving vitality and application to the idea which, as merely
embodied in laws and institutions, would be abortive and
dead. But if it is only the conscience of the individual that
brings the principle of human equality into productive con-
tact with the particular facts of human life, on the other hand
it is from the embodiment of the principle in laws and insti-
tutions and social requirements that the conscience itself
appropriates it. The mistake of those who deny the a priori
character of such 'intuitions'^ of the conscience as that
' I.e. his 'rectification of law, where law fails through being
general.' Arist. Eth. Nic. V. jt. 6.
^ I use the term ' intuition ' here, in the sense commonly attached
to it by recent English writers on Morals, for a judgment not derived
deductively or inductively from other judgments. The reader should
be on his guard against confusing this sense of the term with that in
250 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
represented by Kant's formula, does not lie in tracing a history
of the intuitions, but in ignoring the immanent operation of
ideas of the reason in the process of social organisation, upon
which the intuitions as in the individual depend. A short
summary of the view which we have been seeking to oppose
to theirs will make this view clearer, as it affects the intuition
on which the practice of justice is founded.
216. The individual's conscience is reason in him as in-
formed by the work of reason without him in the structure
and controlling sentiments of society. The basis of that
structure, the source of those sentiments, can only be a self-
objectifying spirit; a spirit through the action of which beings
such as we are, endowed with certain animal susceptibilities
and affected by certain natural sympathies, become capable
of striving after some bettering or fulfilment of themselves,
which they conceive as an absolute good, and in which they
include a like bettering or fulfilment of others. Without such
spiritual action, in however elementary a form, there can be
no society, in the proper human sense, at all ; no community
of persons, however small> to whom the treatment in any re-
spect by each of the other as himself would be intelligible.
On the other hand, given any community of persons ren-
dered possible by such a spiritual principle, it is potentially
a community of all men of whom one can communicate with
the other as ' I ' with ' Thou.' The recognition of reciprocal
claims, established as between its own members within each
of a multitude of social groups, admits of establishment be-
tween members of all the groups taken together. There is
no necessary limit of numbers or space beyond which the
spiritual principle of social relation becomes ineffective. The
impediments to its action in bringing about a practical recog-
nition of universal humanfellowship, though greater in degree,
are the same in kind as those which interfere with the main-
tenance of unity in the family, the tribe, or the .urban com-
monwealth. They are all reducible to what we may con-
which it is used as an equivalent for tlie German 'Anschauung,' or
apprehension of an object.
CH. in] DUTy TO HUMANITY 251
veniently call the antagonism of the natural to the spiritual
man. The prime impediment, alike to the maijitenance of
the narrower and to the formation- of wider -feHowshipvis
selfishness : which we may describe provisionally (pending
a more thorough enquiry into the relation between pleasure
and the good) asji preference of private pleasure to common
good. But the wider, the more universal the fellowship that
is in question, the more serious become those impediments
to it, of which selfishness may and does take advantage, but
which are so far independent of it that they bring the most
self-devoted members of one tribe or state into what seems
on both sides inevitable hostility with those of another.
Such are ignorance, with the fear that springs from ignorance ;
misapprehension of the physical conditions of well-being, and
consequent suspicion that the gain of one community must
be the loss of another ; geographical separations and demar-
cations, with the misunderstandings that arise from them.
The effect of these has often been to make it seem a necessary
incident of a man's obligation to his own tribe or nation that
he should deny obligations towards men of another tribe or
nation. And while higher motives have thus co-operated
with mere selfishness in strengthening national separation and
antagonism, it would be idle to deny a large share, in the
process by which such influences have been partially over-
come, to forces— e.g. the force of conquest and, in particular,
of Roman conquest — which, though they have been applied
and guided in a manner only possible to distinctively rational
agents, have been very slightly under the control of any
desire for social good on the part of the persons wielding
them.
But where the selfishness of man has proposed, his better
reason has disposed. Whatever the means, the result has
been a gradual removal of obstacles to that recognition of
a universal fellowship which the action of reason in men
potentially constitutes. Large masses of men have been
brought under the control each of a single system of law ; and
while each system has carried with it manifold results of selfish
252 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
violence and seeming accident, each has been essentially an
expression of reason, as embodying an idea of permanent well-
being which the individual conceives to be common to his
nation with himself. Each has maintained alike, under what-
ever differences of form, the institutions of the family and of
property ; and there has thus arisen, along with an order of
life which habituates the individual to the subordination of
his likes and dislikes to social requirements, a sort of common
language of right, in which the idea of universal human
fellowship, of claims in man as man — itself the outcome of
the same reason which has yielded the laws of particular
communities — can find the expression necessary to its taking
hold on the minds of men.
217. In the light of these considerations we may trace
a history, if we like to call it so, of the just man's conscience
— of the conscience which dictates to him an equal regard to
the well-being, estimated on the same principle as his own,
of all whom his actions may affect. It is a history, however,
which does not carry us back to anything beyond reason. It
is a history of which reason is the beginning and the end.
It is reason which renders the individual capable of self-
imposed obedience to the law of his family and of his state,
while it is to reason that this law itself owes its existence.
It is thus both teacher and learner of the lesson through
which a conscience of any kind, with the habit of conformity
to conscience, is first acquired, and the individual becomes
capable of a reverence which can control inclinations to
pleasure. Reason is equally the medium of that extension
of one system of law over many communities, of like systems
over a still wider range, which, in prophetic souls reflecting
on it, first elicits the latent idea of a fellowship of all, and
furnishes them with a mode of expression through which the
idea may be brought home to ordinary men. When it is so
brought home, the personal habits which are needed to give
practical effect to it, and which on their part only needed
the leaven of this idea to expand into a wider beneficence,
are already there. But they are there through the action
CH. Ill] DUTY TO HUMANITY 253
of the same reason, as already yielding social order and
obedience within narrower forms of community.
Thus in the conscientious citizen of modern Christendom
reason without and reason within, reason as objective and
reason as subjective, reason as the better spirit of the social
order in which he lives, and reason as his loyal recognition
and interpretation of that spirit — these being but different
aspects of one and the same reality, which is the operation
of the divine mind in man — combine to yield both the judg-
ment, and obedience tp the judgment, which we variously
express by saying that every human person has an absolute
value ; that humanity in the person of every one is always to
be treated as an end, never merely as a means ; that in the
estimate of that well-being which forms the true good every
one is to count for one and no one for more than one;
that every one has a ' suum ' which every one else is bound
to render him.
CHAPTER IV
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MORAL IDEAL (CONTINUED)
C. The Determination of the Idea of Common Good
218, The development of morality, which we have been
considering, has been a development from the primary
recognition of an absolute and common good — a good
common as between some group of persons interested in
each other, absolute as that of which the goodness is
conceived to be independent of the likes and dislikes of
individuals ; but we have so far considered the development
only with reference to the extension of the range of persons
between whom the good is conceived to be common, and
who on this ground come to recognise equivalent duties to
each other. The outcome of the process, when treated in
this one-sided way, exhibits itself merely as the intuition of
the educated conscience that the true good must be good for
all men, so that no one should seek to gain by another's loss,
gain and loss being estimated on the same principle for each.
It has not appeared so far how the conscience is trained in
the apprehension of what in particular the good is, and in
the consequent imposition on itself of particular duties. We
have treated the precept ' suum cuique ' as if the just man
arrived at the idea of its applicability to all men, and at the
corresponding disposition to apply it, without any such
definite enlightenment in regard to the good proper to every
one with whom he may have to do, as is necessary for his
practical guidance. Some such defect of treatment is un-
avoidable so long as abstraction of some kind is the condition
of all exposition ; so long as we can only attend to one aspect
of any reality at a time, though quite aware that it is only one
aspect. We have now to make up for the defect by con-
sidering the gradual determination of the idea of good, which
goes along with the growth of the conviction that it is
PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 255
good for all men alike, and of the disposition to act accord-
ingly.
219. In doing so we must first recall some conclusions
previously arrived at. The idea of a good, we saw, is the
idea of something that will satisfy a desire. In no case is
to think of a pleasure the same thing as to think of a good.
Only if some pleasure is the object of desire does the
anticipation of the satisfaction of the desire yield the idea of
the pleasure as a good. When, as is constantly the case, the
object of strongest desire to a man — the object to which he
is actually directing himself — is not any pleasure, then it is
not any pleasure that is thought of as a good, for it is not
any pleasure that is the object with which the man thinks of
satisfying himself. In that case it is only so far as the man
in desiring contemplates the pleasure, or relief from pain, that
will be constituted by satisfaction of the desire— a pleasure
of which the imagination cannot from the nature of the case
have excited the desire — that any idea of pleasantness enters
into the idea of the object as good at all. Taken by itself,
then, if it could be taken by itself, the mere succession of
desires in a man, as reflected on, would yield the presentation
of many different good things, in which the satisfaction of
those desires had been found and was expected to recur.
Many of these would be pleasures, because many objects of
desire are pleasures (though the thought even of these as
pleasures is different from the thought of them as good) ; but
many would not be pleasures, because there are many objects
of desire which are not imagined pleasures, and which, though
pleasure may be anticipated in their attainment, cannot be
desired on account of that pleasure. That very reflection
on desires, however, which is necessary to the idea of the
several objects satisfying them as good, implies that the
subject of the desires distinguishes himself from them.
Hence there necessarily accompanies or supervenes upon
the idea of manifold good things, in which manifold satis-
factions have been or may be foundj the idea of a possible
object which may yield satisfaction of the desiring man or
256 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
self, as such, who, as satisfaction of each particular desire is
attained, still finds himself anew dissatisfied and wanting.
220. Such an idea is implied in the most elementary moral
judgments. It must be operative in every one who judges of
actions or dispositions as virtuous or vicious, and must be
supposed by him to be operative in every one to whom he
ascribes virtue or vice. For an agent merely capable of
seeking the satisfaction of successive desires, without capacity
for conceiving a satisfaction of himself as other than the
satisfaction of any particular desire, and in consequence
without capacity for conceiving anything as good petma-
nently or on the whole, there could be no possibility of
judging that any desire should or should not be gratified.
No such judgment can be formed of any desire, unless the
desire is considered with reference to a good other than such
as passes with the satisfaction of a desire. Even if the judg-
ment involved no more than a comparison of the pleasures
that had been experienced in the gratification of different
desires, and a decision that one should not be gratified be-
cause interfering with the gratification of another from which
more pleasure was expected, this very comparison would
imply that the person making it distinguished himself from
his desires and was cognisant of something good for himself
on the whole — though for himself only in respect of his
capacity for pleasure — to which good he expects the gratifi-
cation of one desire to contribute more than that of another.
Now the capacity for regarding certain desires as desires
which should not be gratified, must be supposed in any one
who is either to form moral judgments or to have them
applied to him. This must be equally admitted whether we
consider action or disposition to be the proper object of
moral judgment ; whether we hold it to be by effects or by
motives that actions are rendered morally good or bad. Un-
less a man could think of himself as capable of governing
his actions by the consideration that of his desires some
should, while others should not, be gratified, the distinc-
tion of praise-worthy and blame-worthy actions would be
CH. IV] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 257
unmeaning to him. He could not apprehend the dis-
tinction, nor could it with any significance be applied to his
actions.
221. It will scarcely be disputed, then, that the possibility
of moral judgments implies some idea of a good, other than
any particular pleasure or satisfaction of passing desire, with
the superior value of which the value of any such pleasure or
satisfaction may be compared. But we are apt to look upon
the idea of superior good as formed merely by the combina-
tion in thought of the many particular pleasures and satisfac-
tions, as an imagined sum of them. Every one has experience
of certain pleasures, of which he retains the memory and de-
sires the recurrence. Their recurrence in the largest quantity
and with the greatest intensity that he can imagine, forms for
him, it is supposed, when he thinks calmly of the matter,
that greatest good by reference to which he can estimate the
value of the pleasures which from time to time he desires,
counting them objects of which the desire should or should
not be gratified, according as their enjoyment is found upon
experience to be compatible or otherwise with the enjoyment
of that greatest sum of imaginable pleasures.
Now the question is whether the practical idea of some-
thing good on the whole, of a true or chief or highest or
ultimate good — the idea implied in the capacity for moral
judgment — could even in its earliest stages be formed in this
way. The process by which on first thoughts we are led to
suppose that it can be and is so formed, would seem to be
as follows. The good we rightly identify with the desired.
We at the same time accept the notion that the object of
desire is always, some imagined pleasure — a notion which
would not commend itself as it does, but for the confusion
into which we readily fall between the pleasure, or relief from
pain, constituted by the satisfaction of any desire, and the
object exciting the desire. Every particular good being thus
supposed to be some pleasure, we infer that the greatest good
for any, individual must be the greatest quantity of pleasure
possible for him, and that the greatest good of which the
258 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
idea can affect him must be tlie greatest sum of pleasures
that he can imagine.
It is the latter part of the inference that is here specially
in question. Upon reflection it will appear that, from the
supposition that every desire has some imagined pleasure for
its object, it not only is no legitimate inference that a greatest
sum of imaginable pleasures is most desired and therefore
presents itself to the individual as his greatest good ; it rather
follows that no such sum of pleasures can be desired at all.
If the supposition is admitted, we are justified indeed in
arguing that, in one sense of the term,' the greatest pleasure
is most desired, but only in the sense in which the greatest
pleasure means the most intense particular pleasure that can
be remembered or imagined. To argue from it that a greatest
sum of imaginable pleasures is the object most desired, or
one that can be desired at all, is to argue from desire for
a state of feeling to desire for something which is not a pos-
sible state of feeling; There can be no such thing as a state
of feeling made up of a sum of pleasures ; and if the only
possible object of desire is a state of pleasant feeling, as
remembered or imagined, there can be no such thing als de-
sire for a sum of pleasures. A sum of pleasures is not a
pleasure, nor is the thought of it a remembrance or imagina-
tion of pleasure, such as on the supposition excites desire.
It can only exist for the thought of a person considering
certain pleasures as addible quantities, but neither enjoying
them nor imagining their enjoyment. For the feeling of
a pleased person, or in relation to his sense of enjoyment,
pleasures cannot form a sum. However numerous the
sources of a state of pleasant feeling, it is one, and is over
before another can be enjoyed. It and its successors can be
added together in thought, but not in enjoyment or in imagi-
nation of enjoyment. If then desire is only for pleasure, /,«.
for an enjoyment or feeling of pleasure, we are simply the
victims of words when we talk of desire for a sum of plea-
sures, much more when we take the greatest imaginable sum
to be the most desired. We are confusing a sum of pleasures
CH. iv] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 259
as counted or combined in thought, with a sum of pleasures
as felt or enjoyed, which is a nonentity.
222. In the above it is not intended to deny that there
may be in fact such a thing as desire for a sum or contem-
plated series of pleasures, or that a man may be so affected
by it as to judge that some particular desire should not be
gratified, if its gratification would interfere with the attainment
of that more desirable object. The contention is merely that
there could not ' be such a desire if desire were solely for
pleasure, in the sense of being always excited by an imagi-
nation of some feeling of pleasure. As there cannot be a feel-
ing of a sum of pleasures, neither can there be an imagination
of such a feeling. Desire for a sum or series of pleasures is
only possible so far as upon sundry desires, each excited by
imagination of a particular pleasure, there supervenes in a man
a desire not excited by any such imagination ; a desire for
self-satisfaction. The man thinks of himself — he cannot be
properly said to imagine himself — as the permanent subject
of these successive desires and of the successive pleasures by
imagination of which they have been excited ; and a desire
to satisfy himself in their successive enjoyment, unless
counteracted by a desire to satisfy himself in some other
way (whether with some particular pleasure imagined, or with
some object that is not pleasure at all), may arise in conse-
quence. Thus, in order to account for the transition from
desire for imagined pleasures to desire for a sum or series of
pleasures, we must suppose the action of a principle wholly
different from desire for imagined pleasures. We must sup-
pose a determination of desire by the conception of self, its
direction to self-satisfaction. The idea of something good on
the whole, even if nothing but a sum of pleasures entered
into the idea as present to the mind of one whom it renders
capable of moral judgment, could yet not result from the
recurrence of images of pleasure or from a combination of
desires each excited by such an image. A desire to satisfy
oneself, then, as distinct from desire for a feeling of pleasure,
being necessary even to desire for a sum of pleasures, the
s 2
26o MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
question is whether it can be a contemplated possibility of
satisfying oneself with pleasures that yields the idea of a true
or highest good, with which particular gratifications of desire
may be contrasted.
223. Now it is not in dispute that we may and constantly
do seek self-satisfaction for the moment in some imagined
pleasure, though in our calmer mind we know that the
pleasure cannot afford the self-satisfaction sought. We could
not deny this, according to the account previously given of
the will, without denying that the will is often directed to
the attainment of pleasure. To deny it would be as untrue
as to say of any one that his object is always a pleasure,
even the habitual '^ pleasure-seeker ' being liable to particular
propensions excited quite otherwise than by imaginations of
pleasure. But, though self-satisfaction is constantly being
sought in some pleasure or another, without reflection on
the impossibility of its being found there, it is clear that
interest in the attainment of a pleasure cannot suggest an
idea, such as can control action, of something truly good or
good on the whole— an idea of which the import lies in
contrast with the pleasure of which the attraction is for the
moment most strongly felt, and which presupposes some
consideration of the question where self-satisfaction is really
to be found. Reflecting on his desires for certain pleasures,
a man may, no doubt, judge one of them to be more of
a good than another, on the ground of its greater present
attraction for him ; but such a judgment neither implies nor
could yield the contrast of the desired with the desirable, of
good for the moment with good on the whole. It does
indeed imply in any one so judging a distinction of himself
from his feelings, which, at a further stage of its action,
yields the idea of something good on the whole. This idea
arises from a man's thought of himself as there to be satisfied
when any feeling, in the enjoyment of which he may have
sought satisfaction, is over. It is the idea of something in
which he may be satisfied, not for this time and turn merely,
but at least more permanently. Could a contemplated sue-
CH. iv] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 261
cession of pleasures, then, seem to him to offer this relatively
permanent satisfaction ? Could he, while reflecting on him-
self so far as to conceive the need of a lasting good, fail to
reflect also on the fleeting nature of the pleasures of which
he contemplates the succession ? Could he be deluded by
his own faculty of summing the stages of a succession into
supposing that a series of pleasures, of which only one will
be in enjoyment at each stage of the series, and none at all
at the end, is the more lasting good of which he is in search,
and for the sake of which he calls in question the value of
the pleasure for the time most attractive in imagination ?
224. To answer these questions in the negative may seem
unwarrantable, if for no other reason, in presence of the
deliberate judgment of so many enlightened persons who
tell us that their only conception — the only conception
which seems to them possible— of a true good is just that
of a greatest sum of pleasures ; that when they decide against
the pursuit of a particular pleasure as not good on the whole,
they simply mean that its enjoyment would be incompatible
with the attainment of a larger sum of pleasures which it is
open to them to enjoy. Can we doubt that such persons
really form their judgments of the good as they suppose
themselves to do ; and is it not absurd to deny that those
conceptions of the true good, which we inherit and which
affect our consciences, may at any rate have been formed
in the same way ?
Now undoubtedly, if \ve must accept as true the account
which most persons, under the influence of the current
philosophy, give of the ultimate moral idea which actuates
them ; if we are to admit that well-being means for them
a sum of pleasures, the highest well-being the largest possible
sum of pleasures ; it is useless further to argue the question
before us. But there are reasons for not accepting that
account. It rests on a supposition that all desire is for
pleasure. This supposition chiefly commends itself, as has
been previously pointed out, through the confusion into which
we readily fall, in reflecting on any desire, between the object
262 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
of which the idea excites the desire, and the pleasure we
anticipate in the fulfilment of the desire— the pleasure, as it
is sometimes called, of success. If an ordinarily unselfish
man, unaccustomed to precise analysis of mental experiences,
is appealed to by a Hedonistic philosopher to say whether
in calm moments of reflection, when exempt from the
pressure of appetite or of any particular passion, the good
for which he finds himself wishing is not always pleasure —
not any single pleasure, but a quantity of pleasures more or
less distinctly articulated in thought, or perhaps simply
pleasurable existence — he is apt to assent. He does so
because, being interested in certain objects, and being aware
that, when he reflects on his interests, he often says to
himself ' how pleasant it will be when such or such an object
is attained,' he mistakes the desire to satisfy himself in the
attainment of the objects for a desire to satisfy himself with
the pleasure of the attainment.
No doubt this pleasure of attainment is one which, upon
self-reflection, the man really contemplates himself as
enjoying ; there is really a desire for it which co-operates
with his various interests ; but it could not take the place of
the objects of these various interests without destroying the
interests and with them its own possibility. This however
does not prevent men who are in fact deeply absorbed in the
pursuit of objects other than pleasures from being argued into
the belief that, because they are conscious of anticipating
pleasures of attainment, pleasure is the object of their pursuit.
The further step is then easily taken of interpreting this
pleasure as made up of those several pleasures to which,
through the confusion above noticed, it has come to be
supposed that all desires are directed. Thus we settle down
into the notion that our motive principles are on the one hand
particular passions, each excited by imagination of some
pleasure or some pain, and on the other a deliberate desire
for a good made up of as many particular desired pleasures
as, after deduction for incidental pains, we deem ourselves
capable of obtaining. This deliberate desire is taken to be
CH. iv] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 263
the source of our disapproval of certain pleasures as not good
on the whole, because not compatible with the acquisition of
that larger sum of pleasures which is more deliberately desired.
225. As to the mistake of supposing all desires to have
some pleasure or other for their object, enough has perhaps
been said. But writers who have fully recognised this
mistake, who have most strenuously asserted that particular
desires terminate upon their objects, and that those objects
in many cases are not pleasures, have adhered to the notion
that the deliberate desire for what is good on ths whole is
equivalent to desire for a greatest possible quantity of
pleasure. They have indeed generally expressed this as
a desire for happiness, but they have also been generally
ready to accept the identification of happiness with a sum
of pleasures, of greatest happiness with a greatest sum of
pleasures. It might perhaps have been otherwise if the
convenient ambiguity attaching to the term ' happiness ' did
not tend to hide from us the diflSculty of dealing upon this
theory with that desire for the good of others, the genuine-
ness of which we should be slow to dispute. Clearly
a desire for the good of others, though that greatest good
be understood to consist for them in pleasures, is not
a desire for pleasure on the part of the person who enter-
tains it, unless he desires the production of pleasure' to
others, not as an end, but as a means to his own. Now
that benevolence is not to be considered as a desire for any
pleasure to oneself, other than that of doing the benevolent
act, is one of the few points — and it speaks well for the
improvement of our time that it should be so — on which
moralists seem to have come almost to an agreement. But
to consider it a desire for the pleasure of doing the bene-
volent act is to fall into the fallacy of supposing a desire to
be excited by imagination of its own satisfaction — a fallacy
from which such writers as Butler and Hutcheson, and in
recent years Mr. H. Sidgwick\ have kept themselves clear.
226. A desire for the good of others, then, though it be
' Methods of Ethics, Book I. chap. iv.
264 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. Ill
a desire to produce pleasure in them, is not a desire for
pleasure. We may, if we like, apply both to it and to the
desire for our own true well-being the common designation
' desire for happiness ; ' but, if the desire for our own well-
being consists in a desire for a sum of pleasures, we are
applying the common designation to the two kinds of desire
in absolutely different senses. We shall have to take it that
there are two co-ordinate principles, 'Benevolence' and
' Reasonable Self-Love,' alike, according to the phraseology
of the last century, in being calm or settled or deliberate
principles, but wholly different as desires in respect of the
objects to which they are directed, since one is, while the
other is not, a desire for pleasure j and we shall have to
suppose that these serve indifferently as grounds for moral
approbation and disapprobation, the reason for rejecting
desired pleasures as not good on the whole being sometimes
that they are incompatible with the object sought by
Benevolence, sometimes that they are incompatible with
that sought by Reasonable Self-Love.
That our practical judgments as to the true good rest on
two such different principles is a conclusion which, once
clearly faced, every enquirer would gladly escape, as re-
pugnant both to the philosophic craving for unity, and to
that ideal of 'singleness of heart' which we have been
accustomed to associate with the highest virtue. The
method of escaping it generally favoured by Utilitarians
involves the fallacy, already sufficiently noticed, of supposing
benevolent desires to have for their object the pleasure of
their own satisfaction. This fallacy once discerned, the
conclusion can only be avoided either by a bolder denial of
the existence of a deliberate and disinterested benevolence
than we are generally prepared for — by a return, in short,
to the position of Hobbes — or by reconsideration of the
view that ' Reasonable Self-Love,' desire for one's own true
good, is equivalent to desire for a sum of pleasures.
227. Such a reconsideration is forced upon us from a
different quarter so soon as we take account of the fact,
CH. iv] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 265
already noticed, that pleasures do not admit of being
accumulated in enjoyment. A man who is enjoying a pleasure
for the thousandth time has no more pleasure, however much
more an enumerator might reckon him to have had — nay, if
novelty adds a charm to pleasure, he has less —than the man
who is enjoying it for the first time. We may talk, if we like,
of a larger sum of pleasures as more of a good than a less
sum, of a largest possible sum as the greatest or highest
good, but in doing so we are bound to remember, if we would
not be misled by words, that we are talking of ' goods ' of
which, from the nature of the case, there can be neither
possession nor any approach to possession. Now when any
one is deliberately judging what is for his good on the whole,
in the light of the experience presupposed by such a judgment,
it would seem that he can scarcely help being alive to this
state of the case and being affected by it in his judgment.
Reflection upon the perishing nature of pleasures suggests
itself to every one unsophisticated in his ' moralising ' arid
unbiassed by philosophical systems. It is traceable in
literature as far back as the literature of reflection extends.
It would be far more reasonable to suppose that it was the
source of the deliberate quest for something good on the
whole, than that it could be set aside in such a quest. And
if it cannot be set aside, it must effectually prevent the man
who has practically asked himself what it is that can satisfy
him, from seeking a sum of pleasures, even 'the greatest
possible,' in expectation that it can satisfy or tend to satisfy
him ; in other words, under the persuasion that it is that truly
or ultimately desirable object for the sake of which a particular
desired pleasure should be rejected. He cannot really look
forward to any millionth repetition of a pleasant feeling as
bringing him nearer to the satisfaction of himself than he
was the first time the pleasure was felt. It will not at all
follow that such a person, if challenged by a philosopher to
say what the ultimate good is, of which the idea actuates him,
might not, under pressure of the impossibility of adequately
defining it, be drawn into accepting an account of it as
366 MORAL WEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. Ill
a greatest sum of pleasures. The action of the idea in him,
however, is not dependent on the account he may give of it.
The question is whether the idea, as it really actuates him,
can be the idea of a sum of pleasures, of which he must be
aware — and have become aware before the idea could con-
sciously actuate him — that each perishes in the enjoyment.
To the present writer it seems that this question, once
plainly put, carries a negative answer with it.
228. ' But why,' it may be objected, 'should the fact that
a greatest sum of pleasures cannot be enjoyed as a sum, i.e.
all at once, prevent a man from wishing to enjoy this greatest
sum, as it may be enjoyed, successively, and from regarding
this successive enjoyment as the object supremely desirable?'
Now undoubtedly, as already admitted, a man may think of
himself as enjoying many pleasures in succession, may desire
their successive enjoyment and, reflecting on his desire,
esteem the enjoyment a good. But it is not the pleasures
as a sum that attract him. He cannot imagine them as
a sum, for the imagination of pleasure must always be of
some specific feeling of pleasure, which must have ceased to
possess the imagination before another can possess it. What
affects him is the thought of himself as capable of a state of
continuous enjoyable existence, and on the contrary as liable
to a like continuity of pain. The consideration how many
pleasures there will be in the course of the enjoyable exist-
ence, what their sum will amount to, does not at all enter
into or affect the thought of it as desirable. If he judges
a pleasure, which now attracts him, to be not truly a good
on the ground of its incompatibility with ulterior pleasure, it
is not because he presents to himself two possible sums of
pleasure— one as the result would be if the pleasure now
attracting him were enjoyed, the other as it would be if that
pleasure were forgone — and pronounces the latter the larger.
It is because he believes the pleasure which he disapproves
to entail an unnecessary breach in the enjoyable existence,
which he wishes for without reference to any sum of pleasures
that an enumerator might find it to contain.
CH. iv] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 267
This, we say, is the case if a. particular imagined pleasure
is 'in a calm hour' condemned on account of its known
incompatibility with ulterior pleasure, which must mean not
any imagined pleasure but a conceived succession of plea-
sures. But while not denying that an attractive pleasure may
be disapproved on this account, we could not admit that the
ordinary reference of a healthy moral man to his own true
happiness, as a reason for rejecting present pleasure, was to
be thus explained. If it were, it would not have much effect
upon conduct. The thought of oneself as in a state of enjoy-
able existence, if it were not a thought of anything else than
this, could scarcely countervail the attraction of an imagined
pleasure, here and now intensely desired. An imagination
of pain might be effectual for the purpose, but hardly a thought
of pleasure, which is not an imagination of any pleasure in
particular. In truth a man's reference to his own true happi-
ness is a reference to the objects which chiefly interest him,
and has its controlling power on that account. More strictly,
it is a reference to an ideal state of well-being, a state in
which he shall be satisfied; but the objects of the man's
chief interests supply the filling of that ideal state. The
idea of such a state, indeed, neither is, nor is conceived as
being, fully realisable by us. The objects of which we
contemplate the attainment as necessary to its fulfilment
are not contemplated as completely fulfilling it. In our
contemplation of them as truly good the forecast of an
indefinable Better is always present. But in any considera-
tion of true happiness which is other than the vague dis-
content of the sated or bafHed voluptuary, the consciousness
of objects which we are seeking to realise, of ideas to which
we are trying to give effect, holds the first place. Just
because we wish for the attainment of such objects, we are
unhappy till we attain them ; and thus, owing to the
difficulty of mentally articulating them, we are apt to lump
them in our thoughts as happiness. But they do not con-
sist in pleasures. The ideas of them, which we are seeking
to realise, are not ideas of pleasures. Though we may look
268 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS tsK. Ill
forward to our life in attaining them, or when they are
attained, as a pleasant one — and certainly we cannot look
forward to" it as otherwise — this anticipation is quite
secondary. It is only brought into distinct consciousness,
if at all, during intervals of relaxed energy or under the
pressure of an argumentative Hedonist. In short, it is the
realisation of those objects in which we are mainly interested,
not the succession of enjoyments which we shall experience
in realising them, that forms the definite content of our idea
of true happiness, so far as it has such content at all.
229. Our conclusion then is that it is a misinterpretation
of consciousness, arising in a manner not inexphcable, to
regard the idea of a truer or higher good, with which the
good of any particular pleasure or the gratification of any
particular passion may be contrasted — an idea necessary
to the capacity for moral judgment — as equivalent or re-
ducible to the idea of a larger sum of pleasures enjoy-
able by the person entertaining the idea. In the mind at
least of those persons over whom the idea has any con-
trolling power, its filling is supplied by ideal object^ to which
they are seeking to give reality, and of which the realisa-
tion forms their prevailing interest. Such an ideal object '>
for example, is the welfare of a family. In those forms of
human life which we can know, either from the intercourse
of present society or from the record of the past, this object
has probably had the largest share in filling up the idea of
true or permanent good. As a man reflects — perhaps quite
inarticulately — on the transitoriness of the pleasures by
imagination of which his desires are from hour to hour
excited ; as he asks (practically, if without formal expression)
what can satisfy the self which abides throughout and survives
those desires; the thought of the well-being of a family,
with which he identifies himself and of which the continuity
is as his own, possesses his mind. It is interest in this well-
being which forms the most primitive and universal counter-
' It will be understood that by an ideal object is meant an object
present in idea but not yet given in reality.
CH. IV] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 269
vailing influence, apart from imagination of pain, to the
attraction of imagined pleasures. If not strong enough to
prevent such pursuit of pleasures as has been found incom-
patible with the well-being of a family, it at least awakens self-
reproach in the pursuit, a consciousness that it should not be.
Now whatever difficulty there may be in adequately
defining this interest — as there must be, for it is an interest
which, though fundamentally always the same, is constantly
actualising itself in new ways — there is one thing which it
clearly is not. It is not, directly or indirectly, an interest,
on the part of the person influenced by it, either in winning
any particular pleasure, or in securing an enjoyable existence,
or in getting as much pleasure as he can. Doubtless in
looking forward to a well-being of his family, he thinks of
himself as conscious of it and sharing in it, even though he
may expect to be ' laid in the grave ' before his idea of the
family well-being is realised. Every one thus immortalises
himself, who looks forward to the realisation of ideal objects,
with which on the one hand he identifies himself, and which
on the other hand he cannot think of as bounded by his
earthly life, — objects in which he thinks of himself as stil'
living when dead. But to suppose, because a man looks
forward to a satisfaction of his interest in the well-being of his
family and contemplates enjoyment in that satisfaction, that
therefore such enjoyment is the object of the interest, would
be to repeat the mistake of supposing a desire to be excitable
by the idea of its own satisfaction. The fact, if it be a fact,
that the man's conception of the well-being of his family is
nothing but a conception of it as possessing the means to a
sustained succession of pleasures, does not affect the case in
this respect. It remains equally true that his desire for the
family well-being is absolutely different from a desire for
pleasure.
230. There may not be the means of proving that, as
a matter, of fact, the form in which true good, or good on
the whole, was, first conceived was that of family well-being.
The earliest forms in which the most essential practical
270 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. Ill
ideas have taken effect must always, from the nature of the
case, remain beyond the reach of historical investigation.
We are warranted however by simple consideration of its
nature, in holding that the idea of true good could only
become matter of definite consciousness in view of its
possible realisation in an object which at once excites
a strong interest, and can at the same time be regarded as
having the permanence necessary to satisfy the demand
arising from a man's involuntary contemplation of his own
permanence. The idea of the good, it must be remembered,
like all practical ideas, is primarily a demand. It is not
derived from observation of what exists but from an inward
requirement that something should be; something that
will yield self-satisfaction of the kind that is sought when we
think of ourselves as surviving each particular desire and
its gratification. It is this requirement or demand that
first sets us upon seeking to bring objects into existence,
in which some sort of abiding satisfaction may be found ;
but it is only in contemplation of these objects as in some
measure realised or in process of realisation, that the
demand arrives at any clear consciousness of itself, or that
it can yield the idea of something as truly good, in contrast
with something else that is not so.
231. Now among the objects thus brought into existence
by demand for the satisfaction of an abiding self, and of
which the contemplation first supplied some definite con-
tent to the idea of a true good, it would seem that the
most primitive and elementary must have been those that
contribute to supply the wants of a family — to keep its
members alive and comfortably alive. If it is asked by
what warrant we carry back the institution of the family into
the life of the most primitive men, we answer that we carry
it back no further than the interest in permanent good.
From beings incapable of such an interest, even though
connected by acts of generation with ourselves, we cannot
in any intelligible sense have been developed. They cannot
have had any such essential community with ourselves as
CH. iv] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 271
would be implied in calling them men. But the capacity
for such an interest is also the capacity which renders
possible the family bond. That determination of an animal
organism by a self-conscious principle, which makes a man
and is presupposed by the interest in permanent good,
carries with it a certain appropriation by the man to him-
self of the beings with whom he is connected by natural
ties, so that they become to him as himself and in pro-
viding for himself he provides for them. Projecting him-
self into the future as a permanent subject of possible
well-being or ill-being — and he must so project himself in
seeking for a permanent good — he associates his kindred
with himself. It is this association that neutralises the
effect which the anticipation of death must otherwise have
on the demand for permanent good. At a stage of intel-
lectual development when any theories of immortality would
be unmeaning to them, men have already, in the thought
of a society of which the life is their own life but which-
survives them^ a medium in which they carry themselves
forward beyond the limits of animal existence.
232. Thus we conclude that, in the earliest stages of
human consciousness in which the idea of a true or per-
manent good could lead any one to call in question the
good of an immediately attractive pleasure, it was already
an idea of a social good — of a good not private to the man
himself, but good for him as a member of a community.
We conclude that it must have been so, because it is
a man's thought of himself as permanent that gives rise
to the idea of such a good, and because the thought of
himself as permanent is inseparable from an identification
of himself with others, in whose continued life he con-
templates himself as living j and because further, as a
consequence of this, the objects which the effort to realise
this thought brings, into being, and in contemplation of
which the idea of permanent good passes from the more
blindly operative to the more clearly conscious stage, are
arrangements of life, or habits of action, or applications of
272 MORAL WEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. HI
the forces and products of nature, calculated to contribute
to a common well-being. Hence the distinction commonly
supposed to exist between considerate Benevolence and •
reasonable Self-Love, as co-ordinate principles on which
moral approbation is founded, is a fiction of philosophers.
In saying this we must not be understood either to be,
denying that reasonable Self-Love is a source of moral ap-
probation, or to be seeking to reduce Benevolence in any
way to desire for pleasure to oneself. The meaning is that
the distinction of good for self and good for others has never
entered into that idea of a true good on which moral judg-
ments are founded. It must have been held to do so, no
doubt (except upon the selfish hypothesis), if the actuating
idea of a true good, as for oneself, had been founded on
desire for a sum of pleasures ; since a desire for pleasure,
though it may be balanced by a desire to produce pleasure,
and though the two desires may suggest in certain cases the
same course of outward action, must always be absolutely
different from it as a motive. But in fact the idea of a true
good as for oneself is not an idea of a series of pleasures to
be enjoyed by oneself. It is ultimately or in principle an
idea of satisfaction for a self that abides and contemplates
itself as abiding, but which can only so contemplate itself in
identification with some sort of society; which can only look
forward to a satisfaction of itself as permanent, on condition
that it shall also be a satisfaction of those in community with
whom alone it can think of itself as continuing to live. For
practical purposes, or as it ordinarily affects a man, it is an
idea of an order of life, more or less established, but liable
to constant interference from actions prompted by passion
or desire fot pleasure; an order in the rnaintenance and
advancement of which he conceives his permanent well-
being to consist. This well-being he doubtless conceives as
his own, but that he should conceive it as exclusively his
own — his own in any sense in which it is not equally and
coincidentally a well-being of others — would be incompatible
with the fact that it is only as living in community, as sharing
CH. iv] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 273
the life of others, as incorporated in the continuous being of
a family or nation, of a state or a church, that he can sustain
himself in that thought of his own permanence to which the
thought of permanent well-being is correlative. His own
permanent well-being he thus necessarily presents to himself
as a social well-being. The rule of action, which a con-
sideration of this well-being suggests, may sometimes forbid
the indulgence of generous impulses, as it will constantly
forbid the pursuit of an attractive pleasure ; but between it
and the rule of considerate Benevolence there can never be
a conflict, for they are one and the same rule, founded on
one and the same quest for a self-satisfaction which shall
abide, but which no man can contemplate as abiding except
so far as he identifies himself with a society whose well-
being is to him as his own.
233. After all this argumentation, however, which may
already seem too prolix, we may be sure that the old
objection will here return. This permanent well-being, what
is it — what is it conceived as being by the person who de-
sires it — but a succession of pleasures, or of states in which
pleasure predominates over pain, whether it is of himself or
of others that the man thinks as enjoying this succession ?
We can best finally answer this question by gathering into a
summary form the view which it is sought to oppose to that
suggested by the question. But before doing so it will be
well also to put in a final ' caveat ' against two misapprehen-
sions, which may be lurking in our minds when we put the
question. Though we answered it in the aflfirmative, we
should be none the nearer to a reduction of. the moral life
to an origin in mere succession of feelings. As has already
been pointed out [§ 222], a desire for one's own permanent
well-being, though the well-being looked forward to consisted
merely in a succession of pleasures, would still be quite
a different thing, would imply a consciousness of quite a
different nature, from desire excited by an imagined pleasure.
Nor, if we answer it in the afifirmative, will any recognition
of sympathy bring us nearer to an identification of self-
274 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. Ill
I'egarding and ' altruistic ' motives. It is clear that desire
for a well-being as consisting in a succession of pleasures to
oneselfj is quite different from desire for a well-being that
consists in a succession of pleasures to others. The fact
that one man may be pleased or pained by the know-
ledge of another's pleasure or pain does not alter the fact
that each man's pleasure or pain is private to himself.
Desires are determined by their objects; and desire for
pleasure, having an absolutely different object, is an ab-
solutely different desire from desire for the production of
pleasure to others. If therefore a man's desire for his own
true well-being is essentially a desire that he may enjoy a
succession of pleasures, and that for the well-being of others
a desire to convey to them a succession of pleasures, the
two desires are opposite, though perhaps reconcilable prin-
ciples of action, and we must fall back on the view, which
we have been seeking to set aside, of the co-ordination, as
distinct from the identity, of Benevolence and Reasonable
Self-Love.
234. This premised, to the question, What is the well-
being which in a calm hour we desire but a succession of
pleasures ? we reply as follows. The ground of this desire
is a demand for an abiding satisfaction of an abiding self.
In a succession of pleasures there can be no such satisfaction,
nor in the longest prolongation of the succession any nearer
approach to it than in the first pleasure enjoyed. If a
man, therefore, under the influence of the spiritual demand
described, were to seek any succession of pleasures as that
which would satisfy the demand, he would be under a
delusion. Such a delusion may be possible, but wei are not
to suppose that it takes place because many persons, through
a mistaken analysis of their inner experience, affirm that
they have no idea of well-being but as a succession of
pleasures. The demand for an abiding self-satisfaction has
led to an ordering of life in which some permanent provision
is made, better or worse, for the satisfaction of those
interests which are"not interests in the procuring of pleasure,
CH. iv] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 275
but which may be described most generally as interests in
the development of our faculties, and in the like develop-
ment of those for whom we care.
When a man ' sits down in a calm hour ' to consider what
his permanent well-being consists in, what it is that in desir-
ing it he really desires, it is not indeed to be supposed that
he traces the desire back to its ultimate source in his self-
objectifying personality, or that he thinks of its object in the
abstract form of that which will satisfy the demand arising
from such a personality. But, if unbiassed either by particular
passions or by philosophical prepossessions, he will identify
his well-being with an order of life which that demand has
brought into existence. The thought of his well-being will
be to him the thought of himself as living in the successful
pursuit of various interests which the order of society— taking
the term in its "widest sense — has determined for him ; in-
terests ranging, perhaps, from provision for his family to the
improvement of the public health or to the production of a
system of philosophy. The constituents of the contemplated
well-being will be the objects of those various interests,
objects {e.g. the provision for a family or the sanitation of a
town) in process of realisation, which, when realised, take
their place as permanent contributions to an abiding social
good. In them therefore the man who carries himself for-
ward in thought along the continued life of a family or a
nation, a state or a church, anticipates a lasting and accu-
mulating possession, as he cannot do in successive enjoy-
ments. In them he can think of himself as really coming
nearer to an absolute good. Just so far as he is interested
in such objects, he must indeed anticipate pleasure in their
realisation, but the objects, not the pleasure, form the actu-
ating content of his idea of true well-being. A transfer of
his interest from the objects to the pleasure would be its'
destruction.
235. If this answer is accepted to the question, what it is
that we desire in desiring our own true or permanent well-
being, it would seem that we have already answered the
T 3
276 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
question, what it is that we desire in desiring the true well-
being of others. It is the same common well-being, the
same good of a society which we also desire as our own.
No doubt, there are generous impulses consisting in desires
to convey pleasures, simply as such, to others, or to lessen
their pains. These are as little to be ignored as they are to
be identified with desires for pleasures to oneself. But the
desire for the well-being, whether as of others or as of
oneself, is no more to be identified with such generous
impulses, with which it may very well conflict, than those
impulses that are excited by the imagination of pleasure.
The objects of which a man anticipates the realisation in
looking forward to such well-being, are objects, as we have
seen, which he necessarily thinks of as realised for a society
no less than for himself, for himself only as a member of
a society. The opposition of self and others does not enter
into the consideration of a well-being so constituted. Gener-
ous impulses and desires for pleasures may indeed co-operate
with the desire for it, though never equivalent to that desire,
and may do so in different degrees in different cases. The
objects most prominent in a man's working idea of true well-
being will vary, no doubt, according to circumstances and
his idiosyncrasy. To revert to instances previously given,
in one case the sanitation of a town, in another the compo-
sition of a book on an abstruse subject, may hold the largest
place in a man's mind when he sets himself to enquire what
in particular forms the content of the idea of true well-being,
as he individually is actuated by it. In the former case it
can be understood that the impulse to convey pleasures to
particular persons, or to relieve their pains, might effectually
co-operate with the idea as it actuates the individual, while
it scarcely could do so in the latter case. In both cases,
again, anticipated pleasures of achievement might stimulate
the work which interest in a well-being not constituted by
pleasures initiates and directs, though that they should be-
come the main objects of interest would be fatal to the work.
But however the idea of a true good may vary in the par-
CH.1V] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 277
ticular aspect which it presents to the individual according
to the special nature of his higher interests, and in what-
ever measures impulsive benevolence or any desire for plea-
sure may respectively further its operation in him, it remains
true that, in its actuation of the individual, no less than in
that ordering of society which at once is effected through
that actuation of individuals and in turn conditions it, the
idea does not admit of the distinction between good for self
and good for others. As the source of moral action and of
moral judgment, it has equally to control, and in controlling
must be equally independent of, the desire for pleasure and
the desire to please.
236. But granting that in a man's idea of well-being as
true or permanent there is such an identification of his own
and others' well-being, he must still think of it as standing
in some definite relation to others as to himself. He may
think of their true good as also his and of his as also theirs,
but how, it will be asked, does he conceive of the true good
for others, if not as their happiness, i.e. as the most unbroken
succession of pleasures possible for them ? We answer that
the happiness which, under influence of the idea of perma-
nent good, a man seeks for others is of the same kind as
the happiness which, under influence of the same idea, he
seeks for himself. We have seen that true happiness, as
he conceives it for himself, consists in the realisation of
the objects of various interests by which he is possessed —
interests of which he is only capable through self-identifica-
tion with a society. True happiness, as he conceives it for
others, consists in the realisation for them of the same
objects. His own interest in these objects carries with it
an ascription of a like interest to others, and in the realisa-
tion of the objects he anticipates a happiness to them, just
as he anticipates it to himself. Now the interest, as he
experiences it in himself, is an interest, not in pleasure, but
in the objects— these not being pleasures; and what he
seeks to procure for others is a satisfaction of a like interest,
which is not an interest in pleasures. He seeks to help
278 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
them in attaining objects which he supposes to be common
to them with him, and these objects, not being pleasures in
his case, cannot be pleasures in theirs. In the realisation
of the objects there must be pleasure for the others, on sup-
position of their interest in the objects, as for himself, and
in anticipating their realisation of the objects he will doubt-
less also anticipate the pleasure incidental to it; but it is
primarily the objects which he seeks to help them in gain-
ing, the pleasure only as incidental to the attainment of those
particular objects. Pleasures incidental to the attainment of
other objects, though equally pleasures, he would have no
interest in conveying to them. It is a true happiness which
he seeks for them, and the truth of their happiness depends
on the nature of the desired objects, not themselves plea-
sures, to the realisation of which it is incidental.
237. By way of illustration, we may again revert to the
instance of a man supremely interested in the sanitation of
a town. Such a man would naturally be described as de-
voted to the true happiness of his fellow-creatures. No
doubt his great object is to help the men whom he sees
about him to live more happily, and, absorbed in his work,
he is not likely to analyse very accurately what it is that
he presents to himself when he thinks of their living more
happily. It is not at all essential that he should do so. If
in confusion or haste he pronounces that the happiness he
is seeking for them consists merely in a succession of plea-,
sures, the mistake is probably of little practical importance.
It matters less than if he made the same speculative mistake
in regard to the end which he seeks for himself. A theory
that his object for himself was pleasure — the pleasure, as
perhaps he might say, of successful work^might strengthen
the pleasure-seeking tendency, by which such a man, like
all the rest of us, must really be affected, till there might be
danger of its weakening or supplanting the interest which is,
in fact, the condition of his pleasure in his work. A misin-
terpretation of the happiness which he seeks for others can
have no such mischievous effect. Even if, through the
CH. IV] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 279
notion that his motive was desire for the mere pleasure of
others, it really became so, he would not have become a
pleasure-seeker. He would have become a practically less
wise and useful, but not a selfish man.
None the less, however, such a beneficent person would
be really misinterpreting the object which mainly moves
him in so describing it. It is not pleasure, as such, to be
enjoyed by other persons, that he seeks to bring about, but
an improvement of the persons, of which pleasure is the
incident and the sign. He conceives them, like himself, as
having objects which it is their vocation to realise, which
health is the condition of their realising, and which form
part of one great social end, the same for himself as for
them. What this end is he conceives, like the rest of us,
very dimly, though, but for the power which the idea of
there being such an end exercises over him, not only directly
but indirectly through those institutions of society which
are its product, he would not live the life which he does.
Pressed to give an account of it, he readily in his description
puts the pleasure, which is the incident of realisation, in
place of that realisation of worthy objects to which he is in
fact seeking to help his neighbours. He speaks as if that
' happiness ' of others which he is seeking to promote were
merely pleasure irrespectively of the conditions of the plea-
sure, whereas in truth it is a fulfilment of capabilities which,
without clear analysis of what they are, but on the strength
of his own experience, he assigns to the others.
238. There are two questions, however, of which the
consideration might make him more clearly aware what his
mind on the matter really is ; might convince him that, not
pleasure as such, but the attainment of objects other than
pleasures though involving pleasure in their attainment, is
the end to which he seeks to help other men. Let him ask
himself whether he can look upon the value of the pleasure,
which he supposes himself to be labouring to produce, as
depending simply on its amount ; whether he does not, for
others as for himself, distinguish between higher and lower
28o MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
pleasures according to the nature of the pursuit out of which
they arise, or according to the state of mind to which they
are relative. If he does, it must follow that it is not pleasure
as such, or by itself, that he is seeking to produce, but
pleasure as an incident of a life of which the value or
desirability does not consist in its pleasantness. Let him
ask himself, further, whether the ideal end which he seeks
for others as for himself, though it be an end never realised,
is not something in which a permanent satisfaction can be
found ; whether he himself could find true happiness in a
succession of pleasures of which each, having been enjoyed,
leaves him with the consciousness of being no nearer satis-
faction than he was before ; whether on the contrary he does
not count it an essential ciondition of every contribution to
his own true happiness that it should bring him nearer to
the fulfilment of his mission, to a completion of his capa-
cities, as no enjoyment of pleasure can be held to do ; and
whether his final object in working for the true happiness of
others can be to help them to a succession of pleasures,
which would be no contribution to a true happiness as he
seeks it for himself.
239. These considerations might make such a man aware
that his interest in true happiness as for himself, and his
interest in it as for others, are not two interests but one in^
terest, of which the object is not a succession of pleasures
but a fulfilment of itself, a bettering of itself, a realisation of
its capabilities, on the part of the human soul. These
capabilities are not distinctively capabilities of pleasure-
The pleasure of their realisation does not differ as pleasure,
except perhaps in respect of its less intensity, from any
animal enjoyment. They are capabilities of certain kinds
of life and action, of which (as previously explained) no
adequate account can be given till they are attained. Of
what ultimate well-being may be, therefore, we are unable
to say anything but that it must be the complete fulfilment
of our capabilities, even while the idea that there is such an
ultimate well-being may be the guiding idea of our lives.
CH. iv] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 28r
But of particular forms of life and action we can say that
they are better, or contribute more to true well-being than
others, because in them there is a further fulfilment of man's
capabilities, and therefore a nearer approach to the end in
which alone he can find satisfaction for himself.
That interest in a true good which leads us to reject
attractive pleasures as pleasures which should not be enjoyed,
and to endure repellent pains as pains which should be
undergone, is interest in the furtherance of such better forms
of life and action — in their furtherance because they are
better. The special features of the object in which the true
good is sought will vary in different ages and with different
persons, according to circumstances and idiosyncrasy. There
are circumstances in which it cannot present itself to the
individual as anything else than the work of keeping a family
comfortably alive, without reference to the well-being of any
wider society in which the family is included, or to any other
form of family well-being than such as consists in the decent
satisfaction of animal wants. From such a form of the in-
terest in true good to one in which it mainly expresses itself
in the advancement of some branch of knowledge, or the
improvement of the public health, or the endeavour after
' personal holiness,' there may seem to be a great step. But
in all its forms the interest has the common characteristic
of being directed to an object which is an object for the in-
dividual only so far as he identifies himself with a society,
and seeks neither an imagined pleasure nor a succession of
pleasures, but a bettering of the life which is at once his
and the society's.
240. We have dwelt thus at length on the difference be-
tween the interest in a true good or permanent well-being in
all its forms, and the desire to experience any succession of
pleasures, even such a succession as an imaginary enumerator
might find to make up the largest possible sum, in order to
avoid misapprehension in consideration of the process by
which the idea of a true good defines itself and, in defining
282 MORAL WEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
itself, gives rise to the conception of particular duties. This
process, we saw, was really inseparable from that of which
the main features have already been considered ; the exten-
sion, namely, of the range of persons between whom the
good is conceived to be common, and who on this ground
recognise equivalent duties to each other. Following out
that extension as if it were a separate process, we found that
its outcome was the intuition of the educated conscience
that the true good must be good for all men, so that no one
should seek to gain by another's loss, gain and loss being
estimated on the same principle for each. But it had not
so far appeared how the conscience is trained in the appre-
hension of what in particular the good is, and in the conse-
quent imposition on itself of particular duties. This defect
was to be made up by considering the gradual determina-
tion of the idea of good, which goes along with the growth
of the conviction that it is good for all men alike.
We committed ourselves a little way back to the familiar
opinion — more likely to find acceptance than many here
advanced — that the idea of a true good first took hold of men
in the form of a consideration of what was needed to keep
the members of a family alive and comfortably alive. Now
between a state of mind in which the idea of good is only
operative in this form, and one which can at least naturally
express itself in the proposition that the only true good is
the good will, can there be anything in common ? Is it not
idle to attempt to connect them as phases in the operation
of a single spiritual principle ? It would be so, no dpubt, if
interest in provision for the necessities of a family really ex-
hausted the spiritual demand from which it arises. But this
is not the case. It must be remembered that provision for
the wants of a family, of the kind we are contemplating, can-
not have been a merely instinctive process. It cannot have
been so, at least, on supposition that it was a process of
which we can understand the nature from our own experience,
or that it was a stage in the development of the men that we
are and know. • It would not have had anything in common
CH. iv] VIRTUE AS THE COMMON GOOD 283
with the family interests by which we are ourselves influenced,
unless it rested not on instinct but on self-consciousness—
on a man's projection of himself in thought into a future, as
a subject of a possibly permanent satisfaction, to be found
in the satisfaction of the wants of the family with which he
identifies himself. Now this power of contemplating him-
self as possibly coming to be that which he is not, and as so
coming to be in and through a society in which he lives a
permanent life, is in promise and potency an interest in the
bettering of mankind, in the realisation of its capabilities or
the fulfilment of its vocation, conceived as an absolutely
desirable end.
Between the most primitive and limited form of the
interest, as represented by the eifort to provide for the future
wants of a family, and its most highly generalised form, lie
the interests of ordinary good citizens in various elements of
a social well-being. All have a common basis in the demand
for abiding self-satisfaction which, according to the theory
we have sought to maintain, is yielded by the action of an
eternal self-conscious principle in and upon an animal nature.
That demand however only gradually exhibits what it has in
it to require. Until life has been so organised as to afford
some regular relief from the pressure of animal wants, an
interest in what Aristotle calls to eS (ijv, as distinct from t6
f^v', cannot emerge. Yet that primitive organisation of life
through which some such relief is afforded, being rational not
instinctive, would be impossible without the action of the
same self-objectifying principle which in a later stage exhibits
itself in the pursuit of ends to which life is a means, as distinct
from the pursuit of means of living. The higher interest is
latent in the lower, nor would it be possible to draw a line
at which the mere living of the family ceases to be the sole
object and its well-being begins to be cared for.
241. But, when a supply of the means of living has been
sufficiently secured to allow room for a consideration of the
ends of living, what are those ends taken to be ? Can any
' ' Living well,' or ' well-being,' as distinct from merely ' living.'
284 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. ill
such progress be noted in men's conception of them as could
justify us in speaking of a development of the idea of duty ?
If the idea of good were simply equivalent to the idea of
a maximum of pleasure, a growth of moral ideas would
simply mean a progressive discovery of means to pleasure.
A development of the idea of duty, in the sense of a process
affecting our conception of the ends of action, there could
not be. If on this hypothesis we are to speak of a moral
development at all, it can only be in the sense of an in-
creasing enlightenment as to what should be done, in order
to an end of which itself the idea undergoes no modification.
It is otherwise if the idea of the good is an idea of something
which man should become for the sake of becoming it, or
in order to fulfil his capabilities and in so doing to satisfy,
himself. The idea of the good, according to this view, is an
idea, if the expression may be allowed, which gradually
creates its own filling. It is not an idea like that of any
pleasure, which a man retains from an experience that he
has had and would like to have again. It is an idea to which
nothing that has happened to us or that we can find in ex-
istence corresponds, but which sets us upon causing certain
things to happen, upon bringing certain things into existence.
Acting in us, to begin with, as a demand which is ignorant
of what will satisfy itself, it only arrives at a more definite
consciousness of its own nature and tendency through
reflection on its own creations— on habits and institutions
and modes of life which, as a demand not reflected upon, it
has brought into being. Moral development then will not
be merely progress in the discovery and practice of means
to an end which throughout remains the same for the subject
of the development. It will imply a progressive determina-
tion of the idea of the end itself, as the subject of it, through
reflection on that which, under influence of the idea but
without adequate reflection upon it, he has done and has
become, comes to be more fully aware of what he has it in
him to do and to become.
242. Of a moral development in this sense we have
CH.IV] VIRTUE AS THE COMMON GOOD 285
evidence in the result ; and we can understand the principle
of it; but the stages in the process by which the principle thus
unfolds itself remain obscure. As has been already pointed
out, such an end as provision for the maintenance of a family,
if pursued not instinctively but with consciousness of the end
pursued, implies in the person pursuing it a motive quite
different from desire either for an imagined pleasure or for
relief from want. It implies the thought of a possibly
permanent satisfaction, and an effort to attain that satisfac-
tion in the satisfaction of others. Here is already a moral
and spiritual, as distinct from an animal or merely natural,
interest — an interest in an object which only thought con-
stitutes, an interest in bringing about something that should
be, as distinct from desire to feel again a pleasure already
felt. But to be actuated by such an interest does not ne-
cessarily imply any reflection on its nature ; and hence in men
under its influence there need not be any conception of a
moral as other than a material good. Food and drink,
warmth and clothing, may still seem to them to be the only
good things which they desire for themselves or for others.
This may probably still be the case with some wholly
savage tribes ; it may have once been the case with our own
ancestors. If it was, of the process by which they emerged
from it we know nothing, for they have already emerged from
it in the earliest state of mind which has left any record of
itself. All that we can say is that an interest moral and
spiritual in the sense explained — however unaware of its
own nature, however unable to describe itself as directed
to other than material objects — must have been at work to
bring about the habits and institutions, the standards of
praise and blame, which we inherit, even the remotest and
most elementary which our investigations can reach. We
know further that if that interest, even in the form of
interest in the mere provision for the material support of a
family, were duly reflected upon, those who were influenced
by it must have become aware that they had objects inde-
pendent of the gratification of their animal nature; and.
286 MORAL WEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. HI
having become aware of this, they could not fail with more
or less distinctness to conceive that permanent welfare of
the family, which it was their great object to promote, as
consisting, at any rate among other things, in the continu-
ance in others of an interest like their own ; in other words,
as consisting in the propagation of virtue.
243. When and how and by what degrees this process of
reflection may have taken place, we cannot say. It is reason-
able to suppose that till a certain amount of shelter had been
secured from the pressure of natural wants, it would be
impossible. The work of .making provision for the family
would be too absorbing for a man to ask himself what was
implied in his interest in making it, and thus to become aware
of there being such a thing as a moral nature in himself and
others, or of a moral value as distinct from the value of that
which- can be seen and touched and tasted. However strong
in him the interest in the welfare of his society — which, as
we have seen, is essentially a moral interest — until some relief
had been won from the constant care of providing for that
welfare in material forms, he would have no time to think
of any intrinsic value in the persons for whom the provision
was made, or in the qualities which enabled it to be made.
Somehow or other, however — by what steps we know not —
with all peoples that have a history the time of reflection has
come, and with it the supervention upon those moral interests
that are unconscious of their morality, of an interest in moral
qualities as such. An interest has arisen, over and above
that in keeping the members of a family or tribe alive, in
rendering them persons of a certain kind ; in forming in them
certain qualities, not as a means to anything ulterior which
the possession of these qualities might bring about, but
simply for the sake of that possession ; in inducing in them
habits of action on account of the intrinsic value of those
habits, as forms of activity in which man achieves what he
has it in him to achieve, and so far satisfies himself. There
has arisen, in short, a conception of good things of the soul,
as having a value distinct from and independent of the good
CH. IV] VIRTUE AS THE COMMON GOOD 287
things of the body, if not as the only things truly good, to
which all other goodness is merely relative.
Already in the. earliest stages of the development of the
human soul, of which we have any recorded expression, this
distinction is virtually recognised. Such a formal classifi-
cation as that which Aristotle assumes to be familiar, between
TO em-OS ayaSa, ra irepi V'<'XW and to nepi (Tana}, is, of COUrse,
only the product of what may be called reflection upon reflec-
tion. It is the achievement of men who have not only learnt
to recognise and value the spiritual qualities to which material
things serve as instruments or means of expression, but have
formed the abstract conception of a universe of values which
may be exhaustively classified. But independently of such
abstract conceptions, we have evidence in the earliest
literature accessible to us of the conception and appreciation
of impalpable virtues of the character and disposition, stand-
ing in no direct relation to the senses or to animal wants —
courage, wisdom, fidelity, and the like. The distinction is
at least apprehended between the sensible good things that
come to a man, or belong or attach to him as from without,
and the good qualities of the man. It may be that the latter
are chiefly considered in relation to the former, as qualities
contributing to the material welfare of a society ; but, though
there may be as yet no clear notion of virtue as a pure good
in itself independently of anything extraneous that it may
obtain, it is understood that prosperity and the desert of
prosperity are different things. And the recognition of desert
is in itself a recognition of a moral or spiritual good, as
distinct from one sensible or material. It is evidence that
the moral nature, implied in the interest in a social well-
being, has so far reflected on itself as to arrive at moral
conceptions.
244. Whenever and wherever, then, the interest in a social
good has come to carry with it any distinct idea of social
merit — of qualities that make the good member of a family,
' External goods, goods of the soul, and goods of the body. Eth.
Nic. I. viii. b.
288 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. ill
or good tribesman, or good citizen — we have the beginning
of that education of the conscience of which the end is the
conviction that the only true good is to be good. This
process is properly complementary to that previously analysed,
of which the end was described as the conviction that the true
good is good for all men, and good for them all in virtue of
the same nature and capacity. The one process is comple-
mentary to the other, because the only good in the pursuit
of which there can be no competition of interests, the only
good which is really common to all who may pursue it, is
that which consists in the universal will to be good — in the
settled disposition on each man's part to make the most and
best of humanity in his own person and in the persons of
others. The conviction of a community of good for all men
can never be really harmonised with our notions of what is
good, so long as anything else than self-devotion to an ideal
of mutual service is the end by reference to which those
notions are formed.
245. In fact we are very far, in our ordinary estimates of
good, whether for ourselves or for others, from keeping such
a standard before us, and just for that reason the conviction
of the community of good for all men, while retaining its
hold on us as an abstract principle, has little positive influence
over our practical judgments. It is a source of counsels of
perfection which we do not ' see our way ' to carrying out.
It makes itself felt in certain prohibitions, e.g. of slavery, but
it has no such effect on the ordering of life as to secure for
those whom we admit that it is wrong to use as chattels much
real opportunity of self-development. They are left to sink
or swim in the stream of unrelenting competition, in which
we admit that the weaker has not a chance. So far as negative
rights go — rights to be letalone — theyareadmittedto member-
ship of civil society, but the good things to which the pursuits
of society are in fact directed turn out to be no good things
for them. Civil society may be, and is, founded on the idea
of there being a common good, but that idea in relation to
the less favoured members of society is in effect unrealised,
CH. iv] VIRTUE AS THE COMMON GOOD 289
and it is unrealised because the good is being sought in
objects which admit of being competed for. They are of
such a kind that they cannot be equally attained by all.
The success of some in obtaining them is incompatible with
the success of others. Until the object generally sought as
good comes to be a state of mind or character of which the
attainment, or approach to attainment, by each is itself a con-
tribution to its attainment by every one else, social life must
continue to be one of war — a war, indeed, in which the neutral
ground is constantly being extended and which is itself con-
stantly yielding new tendencies to peace, but in which at the
same time new vistas of hostile interests, with new prospects
of failure for the weaker, are as constantly opening.
CHAPTER V.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MORAL IDEAL — CONTINUED.
D. TTie Greek and the Modern Conceptions of Virtue.
246. Our next business will be to consider more in detail
how that gradual spiritualisation or dematerialisation (in the
sense explained) of the idea of true good, through which alone
it can come to answer the inward demand which is its source,
exhibits itself in the accepted standards of virtue and in the
duties which the candid conscience recognises. The concep-
tion of virtue is the conception of social merit as founded on
a certain sort of character or habit of will. Every form of
virtue arises from the effort of the individual to satisfy him-
self with some good conceived as true or permanent, and it
is only as common to himself with a society that the individual
can so conceive of a good. He must in some way identify
himself with others in order to conceive himself as the subject
of a good which can be opposed to such as passes with his
own gratification. Thus both the practice of virtue and the
current standard of virtue, which on the one hand presupposes
the practice and on the other reacts upon and sustains it, have
a history corresponding to the gradual development and deter-
mination of the idea of what social good consists in.
The virtue which is practised and esteemed with reference
to a common well-being, constituted by such good things as,
according to the distinction above noticed, would fall under
the head of ' external ' or ' bodily goods,' has indeed an ele-
ment of identity with the virtue practised or esteemed with
reference to a well-being of which the virtue itself is an integral
element, but has also an important difference from it. The
identity between the two kinds of virtue consists in the fact
that the good to which each is relative is a common good and
is desired as such. In both cases the virtue rests upon an
GREEK AND MODERN IDEAS OF VIRTUE 291
interest which is effectually distinguished from any desire for
pleasure, from any egoistic passion, by being directed to an
object which the individual presents to himself as common
to him with others and as desirable on that account. The
difference lies in the degree of truth and adequacy with which
the common good is conceived in one case as compared with
the other.
When the end with reference to which social merit is
judged of is merely some form of material well-being, the
moral effort is being directed to an end of merely relative
value as if it were of absolute value. That effort rests, as we
have seen, on the inward demand for a true or abiding self-
satisfaction, and this is not to be found in the possession of
means to a succession of pleasures any more than in the
succession itself, not in the possession of anything which one
man or group of men can possess to the exclusion of another.
A common good conceived as consisting in such possession
is inadequately conceived — conceived in a manner which
must ultimately lead to the self-defeat of the moral effort —
and the virtue directed by the conception, though it has the
root of identity, just pointed out, with a higher virtue, is so
far inferior. Considered merely as ' self-devotion ' it may be
on a level with the highest virtue. There may be as genuine
self-devotion in the act of the barbarian warrior who gives
up his life that his tribe may win a piece of land from its
neighbours, as in that of the missionary who dies in carrying
the gospel to the heathen. But it is a falsely abstract view
of virtue to take no account of the end in pursuit of which
the self is devoted. The real value of the virtue rises with
the more full and clear conception of the end to which it is
directed, as a character not a good fortune, as a fulfilment
of human capabilities from within not an accession of good
things from without, as a function not a possession. The
progress of mankind in respect of the standard and practice
of virtue has lain in such a development of the conception
of its end.
247. We cannot so write without being reminded of the
u 2
292 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. Ill
famous opening of Kant's ' Foundation of the Metaphysic of
Morals,' — ' Nothing can be conceived in the world, or even
out of it, which can be called good without qualification, but
a Good Will.' In describing the development in question,
however, as a growth of the conviction that the only uncon-
ditional good is a good will, and a consequent more definite
refei'ence of virtue to this unconditional good as its end, we
run a risk of misapprehension. Can it be intended, the
reader may ask, that no action is morally good, or directed
as it should be, unless the object of the doer is to promote
goodness or to become good ? Has this been the object with
reference to which, as a matter of fact, the habits and dis-
positions ordinarily reputed virtuous have come to be so
reputed? If the ultimate dictum of the enlightened con-
science is to be that, just as according to St. Paul 'whatsoever
is not of faith is sin,' so no action is morally good unless
done for the sake of its goodness, shall we not have to make
out some wholly new diaypa<t>ri or ' table ' of the virtues, in-
capable of natural adjustment to the actual usage of our
terms of praise and blame ? Is it not more rational to say
with Hume that ' no action can be virtuous, or morally good,
unless there be in human nature some motive to produce it,
distinct from the sense of its morality ' ? '
The formula quoted from Kant is certainly liable to be
understood in a way which challenges these objections. The
good will may be taken to mean a will possessed by some
abstract idea of goodness or of moral law ; and, if such
possession were possible at all, except perhaps during
' Treatise on Human Nature, Book III. Part II. § i. The ground
for the proposition in the text is thus put by Hume in the sequel :
' It is a plain fallacy to say, that a virtuous motive is requisite to
render an action honest, and at the same time that a regard to the
honesty is the motive of the action. We can never have a regard to
the virtue of an action, unless the action be antecedently virtuous.
No action can be virtuous but so far as it proceeds from a virtuous
motive. A virtuous motive therefore must precede the regard to the
virtue ; and 'tis impossible that the virtuous motive and the regard to
the virtue can be the same.'
CH. v] GREEK AND MODERN IDEAS OF VIRTUE 293
moments of special spiritual detachment from the actualities
of life, it would amount to a paralysis of the will for all effec-
tual application to great objects of human interest. It would
no longer be the will of the good workman, the good father,
or the good citizen. But it is not thus that we understand
the good will. The principle which it is here sought to
maintain is that the perfection of human character — a per-
fection of individuals which is also that of society, and of
society which is also that of individuals — ^is for man the only
object of absolute or intrinsic value ; that, this perfection
consisting in a fulfilment of man's capabilities according to
the divine idea or plan of them, we cannot know or describe
in detail what it is except so far as it has been already
attained ; but that the supreme condition of any progress tO'
wards its attainment is the action in men, under some form
or other, of an interest in its attainment as a governing in-
terest or will; and that the same interest — not in abstraction
from other interests, but as an organising influence upon and
among them — must be active in every character which has
any share in the perfection spoken of or makes any approach
to it, since this perfection, being that of an agent who is
properly an object to himself, cannot lie in any use that is
made of him, but only in a use that he makes of himself.
248. We hold that in fact the estimation of virtue, the
award of praise and blame, has always had reference to man
himself, not to anything adventitious to man, as the object
of ultimate value from which the value of any virtue was
derived. In those primitive conditions of society, in which
attention was so necessarily concentrated on the simple
maintenance of life that there was no room for the virtues
of culture and reflection to develope, we have no reason to
doubt that it was a contemplation of possible persons who
should exist in the family which gave the family interest its
real meaning to those who were actuated by itj just as now,
to the poor person whose waking hours are spent in the
struggle to keep his family respectable, it is not any abstrac-
tion of the family, but the contemplation of sons and
294 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. Ill
daughters, as persons living decent lives in the future, that
is the moving influence. The primitive virtue that meant
merely valour in the struggle for a life of which others were
to share the benefit had yet its animating principle in the
idea of something which the valorous man and the others,
in and for themselves, were to become. As the horizon of
man's possibilities expands upon the view, as new forms of
social merit relative to the fulfilment of those capabilities
come to be recognised, the conception of virtue becomes
proportionately complex. With an Athenian in the period
of the bloom of Hellas, the term which we can only render
'virtue' was apparently used for any eminent faculty exercised
in anyof the regionsof human achievement' — regions scarcely
less wide and various then than now — so that Aristotle found
it necessary to distinguish ' intellectual virtues ' from those
of habit and character. But however discrepant may seem
to us to have been the kinds of excellence or ability that
were alike spoken of as the ' virtue ' of men, however little
they may have been affected by any conception of moral
law, of any duty owed by man to God or his neighbour, as
such, they were still dependent both for their estimation and
for their practice on the conception of intrinsic value, as
lying not in anything that might happen to a man, in his
pleasure or his good fortune, but in what he might do and
might become. Virtue was a hivafiK tiepytTiKfj, a faculty of
beneficence"- The range of recognised beneficence was
wide, as the range of capabilities of which men were be-
coming conscious was wide. There was a 'virtue' to be
exhibited in handicraft no less than in the functions of a
magistrate or citizen-soldier or head of a family ; but it was
some interest in the achievement by men of what they had
it in them to do, in their becoming the best they had it in
them to become, that at once governed the estimation of
virtue in all these cases and inspired or sustained the practice.
249. There were ages, no doubt, in which this interest,
' Time. I. xxxiii. 2 ; II. xl. 6 (Arnold's note); Arist. Rhet, I. ix, a.
' Arist. loc, cit.
CH. v] GREEK AND MODERN IDEAS OF VIRTUE 295
though active enough, took little account of itself; ages in
which the question was never raised how far the forms of
action which commonly excited praise were really co-operative
with each other, or really contributory to the end which was
being pursued with little reflection on its nature. When and
how the period of reflection is reached, what are the conditions
which enable some nations to reach it while others apparently
do not, we do not know ; but when it is reached, there arises
a quest for some definite and consistent conception of the
main ends of human achievement. Is there some one direc-
tion, common to all the forms of activity esteemed as virtuous,
which explains and justifies that estimation ? This question,
it is to be observed, is in its effiect by no means merely a specu-
lative one. In the process of bringing into clear and har-
monious consciousness the nature of ends previously pursued
under the influence of some idea of value which could give
no account of itself, the incompatibility of some of these ends
with others becomes apparent, and the possibility suggests it-
self of so methodising life as to avoid the misdirection of
activity and keep it to channels in which it may really con-
tribute to the one end of supreme value, however that may be
conceived. Hence along with the conviction of the unity of
virtue, which finds so clear and strong an expression in the
Greek philosophers, we find an attempt both to reform the
current estimation of the several practices and dispositions
counted virtuous, and to introduce a systematic order of living
for individuals and communities, corresponding to the idea
of the unity of the end.
The habit of derogation from the uses of 'mere philosophy,'
common alike to Christian advocates and the professors of
natural science, has led us too much to ignore the immense
practical service which Socrates and his followers rendered to
mankind. From them in effect comes the connected scheme
of virtues and duties within which the educated conscience
of Christendom still moves, when it is impartially reflecting
on what ought to be done. Religious teachers have no doubt
affected the hopes and fears which actuate us in the pursuit of
296 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
virtue or rouse us from its neglect. Religious societies have
both strengthened men in the performance of recognised
duties, and taught them to recognise relations of duty towards
those whom they might otherwise have been content to treat
as beyond the pale of such duties ; but the articulated scheme
of what the virtues and duties are, in their difference and in
their unity, remains for us now in its main outlines what the
Greek philosophers left it.
250. In their Ethical teaching, however, the greatest of
the Greek philosophers — those to whom Christendom owes,
not indeed its highest moral inspiration, but its moral cate-
gories, its forms of practical judgment — never professed to
be inventors. They did not claim to be prophets of new
truth, but exponents of principles on which the good citizen,
if he thought the matter out, would find that he had already
been acting. They were seeking a clearer view of the end
or good towards which the /Sior ttoXit-ikos, the citizen-life, was
actually directed. And this conception of their vocation
was not less true than, in its superiority to personal self-
assertion, it was noble. They were really organs through
which reason, as operative in men, became more clearly aware
of the work it had been doing in the creation and maintenance
of free social life, and in the activities of which that life is at
once the source and the result. In thus becoming aware of
its work the same reason through them gave a further reality
to itself in human life. The demand for an abiding satis-
faction, for a true or permanent good, in action upon the
wants and fears and social impulses of men, had yielded the
institutions of the family and the state. These again had
brought into play certain spiritual dispositions and energies,
recognised as beneficent and stimulated by the effect of that
recognition on the social man, but not yet guided by any
clear consciousness of the end which gave them their value.
In arriving at that consciousness of itself, as it did specially
through the Greek philosophers, the same spiritual demand
which had given rise to the old virtue yielded a virtue which
was in a certain important sense new ; a character which
CH. v] GREEK AND MODERN IDEAS OF VIRTUE 297
would not be satisfied without understanding the law which it
obeyed, without knowing what the true good was, for which
the demand had hitherto been more blindly at work.
251. We speak of the change advisedly as consisting not
merely in a new theory about virtue, but in a higher order
of virtue itself. Socrates and his followers are not rightly
regarded as the originators of an interesting moral specula-
tion, such, for instance, as Hume may have started as to the
nature of ' moral sense,' or the evolutionists as to its here-
ditary development. They represent, though it might be too
much to say that they introduced, a new demand, or at least
a fuller expression of an old demand, of the moral nature.
Now though our actual moral attainment may always be far
below what our conscience requires of us, it does tend to
rise in response to a heightened requirement of conscience,
and will not rise without it. Such a requirement is implied
in the conception of the unity of virtue, as determined by
one idea of practical good which was to be the conscious
spring of the perfectly virtuous life— an idea of it as consist-
ing in some intrinsic excellence, some full realisation of the
capabilities, of the thinking and willing soul. Here we have —
not indeed in its source, but in that first clear expression
through which it manifests its life — the conviction that every
form of real goodness must rest on a will to be good, which
has no object but its own fulfilment. When the same con-
viction came before the world, not in the form of a philosophy
but in the language of religious aspiration — ' Blessed are the
pure in heart, for they shall see God' — and when there seemed
to be a personal human life which could be contemplated as
one in which it had been realised, it appealed to a much wider
range of persons than it had done in the schools of Greece,
and moved the heart with a new power. But if those affected
by it came to ask themselves what it meant for them — in
what the morality resting on purity of heart consisted —it was
mainly in forms derived, knowingly or unknowingly, from the
Greek philosophers that the answer had to be given.
252. The purity of the heart can only consist in the nature
298 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
of its motives or governing interests. Actions, the same out-
wardly, represent a heart more or less pure, according as the
motive which prompts them is more or less singly or pre-
dominantly an interest in some form or other of that which
is truly good ; or — to say the same thing in a manner less
liable to be misunderstood, since motives do not admit of
isolation — according as the motive belongs to a character
more or less thoroughly governed by such an interest. This
distinction of true from seeming virtue, as dependent on the
motive of each, was brought out by Plato and Aristotle with
a clearness which was in fact final. Their account of the
true good itself was indeed but formal and provisional, as,
for reasons already indicated, every such account must be ;
though, unless mankind has lived its last two thousand years
in vain, the formal and provisional account of the good should
mean more for us than it could mean for the Greeks. But
that a conscious direction to this good — a ' purity of heart ' in
this sense — was the condition of all true virtue and constituted
the essential unity between one form of virtue and another,
this they taught with all the consistency and directness which
a Christian teacher could desire, which indeed stands in strong
contrast with the appeal to semi-sensual motives that has been
common, and perhaps necessary for popular practical effect,
m the Christian Church. ToO khXou fvcKW kohov yap tovto roir
apfTuU ', is the formula in which Aristotle sums up the teach-
ing of himself and his master as to the basis of goodness.
Like every formula, it may have come to be used as cant,
but in its original significance it conveyed the great principle
that a direction of a man's will to the highest possible realisa-
tion of his faculties is the common ground of every form of
true virtue. This direction of the will, according to both
Aristotle and Plato, was to be founded on habit; but the
habit even in its earliest and least reflective stage was to be
under the direction of reason, as embodied in law or acting
through a personal educator, and through appropriate teach-
' ' Desire for wliat is beautiful or noble ; this is llic common
characteristic of all the virtues.' Arist. IClli. Nic, IV. ii. 7.
CH. v] GREEK AND MODERN IDEAS OF VIRTUE 299
ing was in due time to pass into a fully intelligent and appre-
ciative conformity to the reason which was its source. Given
this direction of the will, uniting intellectual apprehension
with strongest desire, all virtue was given ' : without it there
was, in the proper sense, none, but at best only such a possi-
bility of virtue as may be afforded by tendencies and habits,
directed from without to higher ends than the subject has
intelligently made his own.
253. This view of the essential principle of all virtue at
once distinguishes the doctrine of Plato and Aristotle from
any form of Hedonism, or of Utilitarianism so far as
Hedonistic. The condition of virtuous action according
to them did not lie in its production of a certain effect, but
in its relation to a certain object, as rationally desired by
the agent ; and this was an object of which the nature,
as desired, was not that which according to the Hedonist
alone excites desire. It was not an imagined pleasure.
But a student of these philosophers will be apt to remark
that, although clearly the quality which, according to them,
makes an action good is not that which makes it good
"according to the Utilitarian, and is relative to some other
end than the pleasure which the Utilitarian deems alone
either desired or desirable, it is not so clear what this other
end is. And this indefiniteness, he will argue, in the con-
ception of the end, on conscious direction to which virtue is
made to depend, must be just so far an indefiniteness in the
conception of virtue itself. An end, which is not pleasure,
is to be desired for its own sake ; so far ' purity of heart ' is
insisted on ; but, unless we know what the end is, we are
still in the dark as to the real characteristics of the heart
purely devoted to it. If from the Hedonistic point of view
' purity of heart ' can have no meaning at all, can the Greek
philosophers on the other hand, it may be askedj do more
than assure us that there must be such a thing and that it
' Cf. Arist. EtI). Nic. VI. xiii. 6. "A/ta 7-17 ippoviiati. lua ovaig iraaat
Inap^ovaiv {sc. al apeTai\ ' The single virtue of practical wisdom
implies the presence of all the moral virtues.'
30O MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. ill
is morally all-important, without being able to point to any
real interest corresponding to this formal idea? Did not
' purity of heart ' acquire a meaning in the Christian Church,
other than it could have borne in the schools of philosophy,
because the Christian revelation supplied this interest ?
Now that there are senses in which a higher moral standard
is possible for the Christian citizen than was possible for the
Greek of Aristotle's age, will not be disputed. We have
already dwelt on an important difference, arising out of the
fact that a practical conviction of the brotherhood of all
men, such as was impossible to the Greek, brings with it
for us a new standard of justice — not indeed a new concep-
tion of what is due towards those who have claims of right
upon us, but a new view of the range of persons who have
such claims. As we proceed we shall see how the interests
of the ' pure heart ' have become really more determinate,
its demands upon itself fuller, in the Christian society than
they were to the most enlightened and conscientious Greek.
But for the present our concern is rather to point out the
greatness — in a certain sense the completeness and finality
— of the advance in spiritual development which the Greek
philosophers represent. Once for all they conceived and
expressed the conception of a free or pure morality, as
resting on what we may venture to call a disinterested
interest in the good ; of the several virtues as so many
applications of that interest to the main relations of social
life; of the good itself not as anything external to the
capacities virtuously exercised in its pursuit, but as their
full realisation. This idea was one which was to govern
the growth of all the true and vital moral conviction which
has descended to us. It had indeed still to acquire fulness
and determinateness with the formation of habits and insti-
tutions corresponding to it, but it was itself the source of
that formation. It was not indeed ever to become such
a definitely presentable rule of life as we often sigh for, but
we must bear in mind that, so far as the shortcomings which
we are apt to complain of in it arise from the impossibility
CH. v] GREEK AND MODERN IDEAS OF VIRTUE 301
either of envisaging or of exhaustively defining the good
which it presupposes, they are inseparable from the very
nature of morality, as an effort not an attainment, a pro-
gressive construction of what should be, not an enjoyment
of what is, governed not by sight but by faith. They are
shortcomings, in fact, to which it is only through illusions
that we can claim superiority.
254. Aristotle, as we know, with all the wisdom of Plato
before him, which he was well able to appropriate, could
find no better definition of the true good for man than the
full exercise or realisation of the soul's faculties in accord-
ance with its proper excellence, which was an excellence of
thought, speculative and practical. The pure morality then,
which we credit him with having so well conceived, must
have meant morality determined by interest in such a good.
But what real import or filling, it will be asked, can such
an interest have? Is not the conception of morality, as
determined by this interest, if it is really no more than it
professes to be, essentially an empty conception ? To this
we answer that it would have been an empty conception, if
there had not already taken place such a realisation of the
soul's faculties as gave a meaning, though not its full and
final meaning, to the definition of the good. In fact, how-
ever, as we have already seen, the same spiritual principle
which yielded the demand for an account of what was good
in itself, and the conception of true goodness as determined
by interest in that good, had also yielded a realisation of
the soul's faculties in certain pursuits and achievements, and
in a certain organisation of life. Already there were arts
and sciences, already families and states, with established
rules of what was necessary for their maintenance and fur-
therance. Thus such a definition of the good as Aristotle
gives us was more than explanatory of the meaning of a
name. It was rather the indication of a spiritual problem,
of which some progress had been made in the solution.
The realisation of the soul's faculties had not to wait to
begin ; the desire for, the interest in, such a good had not
302 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
Still to be initiated. The philosopher had ' not to bring
before men an absolutely new object of pursuit, but to bring
them to consider what gave its value to an object already
pursued.
255. From that very consideration, it is true, the object
took a new character for the consciousness of the person
pursuing it. It began to be for him what it had previously
been only in itself, or in idea, or for some divine spirit
working through him but without his knowledge. The
realisation of the soul's faculties in the state, for instance,
though in one sense it has already been an object to every
one who duly performs his functions as a citizen, becomes
an object in a new sense to one who is conscious of his
citizen's work as contributing in some humble way to an
end whicli is the bettering of the citizens, and who does it
or seeks to do it, not for incidental pleasure or reward, but
for the sake of that end. To awaken such a consciousness
in men, and thus to enable them to do old work in a spirit
that made it new, was the function of the Socratic philoso-
phers. They had not to create wisdom, or fortitude, or
temperance, or justice. They had not to direct the habits
of action, recognised as laudable under those names, to any
other object than that in relation to which they had always
had their value; but they had to make it clear that this
object, being a perfection of the rational man, an unfolding
of his capacities in full harmonious activity, was not one to
which the virtuous practices were related as means to an
external end, but itself included their exercise. To do so
was to establish the principle of the conviction that goodness
is to be sought for its own sake and, as so sought, is itself
and alone the good ; but it was not to leave the conception
of goodness without definite content. On the contrary it
was to determine it further, as a conception of the modes of
action, hitherto counted virtuous, with the added qualifica-
tion that, in order to be truly virtuous, they must be. brought
into harmony with each other as jointly contributing to a
perfection of life, and must each have their root in a" char-
CH. V] GREEK AND MODERN IDEAS OF VIRTUE 303
acter of which the governing interest was an interest in that
perfection.
256. In the development of that reflective morality which
our own consciences inherit, both the fundamental principle
and the mode of its articulation have retained the form
which they first took in the minds of the Greek philoso-
phers. To whatever alien speculative influences we may
have been subject — and of late no doubt the influences of
evolutionary Hedonism have been strongly alien — we do
not get rid of the conviction that to be good in one of the
many forms of goodness is for the individual the good ; that,
inexhaustibly various as those forms may be, each of them
must be founded on a will, of which the good in one or
other of these forms is the object ; and that the good for
man, in that universal sense in which it is beyond the
reach of the individual's realisation, must yet be of a kind
which is related to all forms of individual goodness as the
life of a body to the various vital functions, at once result-
ing from them and rendering them possible. And when
we come to ask ourselves what are the essential forms in
which, however otherwise modified, the will for true good
(which is the will to be good) must appear, our answer
follows the outlines of the Greek classification of the virtues.
It is the will to know what is true, tc) make what is beauti-
ful; to endure pain and fear, to resist the allurements of
pleasure {i.e. to be brave and temperate), if not, as the
Greek would have said, in the service of the state, yet in the
interest of some form of human society ; to take for oneself,
to give to others, of those things which admit of being given
and taken, not what one is inclined to but what is due.
257. It was not, of course, by accident that, when reflec-
tive morality first took shape among the Greeks, it became
aware of these main lines through which the good was to be
pursued. As was said above, the effort after a true good
had already worked in these lines and was to continue to
work in them, and it is the continuity of that work as carried
on by us— the actual progressive realisation of human capaci-
304 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. ill
ties in knowledge, in art, and in social life — that has been
the ground of identity between the first systematic reflection
on the goodness exhibited in those Hnes, and all reflection
on the same subject that has followed. And just as it has
been the continuity in the actual pursuit of the true good
that has kept those standards of virtue, which arise in reflec-
tion upon the pursuit, the same through succeeding ages, so
it has been in sequence upon variations in the actual pursuit,
which have taken place independently of reflection, that
variations in the standards implying reflection have arisen.
On the whole the variations in the object pursued as good,
though there have been periods apparently of mere loss and
shrinkage, have consisted in its acquisition of greater fulness
and determinateness. In like manner the differences be-
tween our standards of virtue and those recognised by the
Greek philosophers arise from the greater fulness of condi-
tions which we include in our conception of the perfecting
of human life. The realisation of human capacities has,
in fact, taken a far wider range with us than in the most
advanced of ancient states. As actually achieved, it is
a much more complete thing than it was two thousand
years ago, and every progress achieved opens up a further
vista of possibilities still unrealised. In consequence the
attainment of true good presents itself to men under new
forms. The bettering of human life, though the principle
of it is the same now as in the Socratic age, has to be carried
on in new ways ; and the actual pursuit of true good being
thus complicated, reflection on what is implied in the pursuit
yields standards of virtue which, though identical in principle
with those recognised by Aristotle, are far more comprehen-
sive and wide-reaching in their demands. This will appear
more clearly if we consider how Aristotle's account of fortitude
and temperance would have to be modified in order to
answer the requirements of the Christian conscience.
258. If a 'Christian worker' who devotes himself, un-
noticed and unrewarded, at the risk of life and at the
ck. v] - PohTiTUDk 305
sacrifice of every pleasure but that of his work, to the service
of the sick, the ignorant and the debased, were told that his
ideal of virtue was in principle the same as that of the dvdpdoi,
' the brave man,' described by Aristotle, and if he were in-
duced to read the description, he would probably seem to
himself to find nothing of his ideal in it. Yet the statement
would be true. The principle of self-devotion for a worthy
end in resistance to pain and fear is the same in both cases.
But Aristotle could only conceive the self-devotion in some
form in which it had actually appeared. He knew it in no
higher form than as it appeared in the citizen-soldier, who
faced death calmly in battle for his State. In that further
realisation of the soul's capacities which has taken place in
the history of Christendom, it has appeared in a far greater
wealth of forms. In Aristotle's view the /Si'os Trpannxos — the
life of rational self-determined activity — was only possible
for a few among the few. It presupposed active participa-
tion in a civil community. Such communities could only
exist in certain select nations, and, where they existed, only
a few of the people contributing to their maintenance and
living under their direction were fit to share in civil func-
tions. These alone had moral claims or capabilities. The rest
were instruments of their convenience. In modern Christen-
dom it is not merely our theories of life but the facts of life
that have changed. ' Weak things of the world and things
that are despised hath God called.' With the recognition of
rights in human beings as such, on which we have previously
dwelt (§ 201 and foil.), there comes a new realisation of
human capacities, not only for the emancipated multitude,
but for those whom Aristotle would have allowed to be
previously sharers in the /3ior npoKTiKos. The problems of life
become for them far more difficult indeed, but, jtist on
account of their greater range and complication, they be-
come of such a kind as to elicit powers previously unused.
We are apt to speak as if the life of the Greek or Roman
citizen, in the full bloom of municipal civilisation, was much
fuller and richer than that of the modern citizen under a
3o6 MORAL WEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. Ill
regime of universal freedom and equal rights. For the
many we admit the modern system may be a gain, but for
the few we take it to be a corresponding loss. Yet this is
surely a very superficial view. The range of faculties called
into play in any work of social direction or improvement
must be much wider, when the material to be dealt with
, consists no longer of supposed chattels but of persons as-
serting recognised rights, whose welfare forms an integral
element in the social good which the directing citizen has
to keep in view. Only if we leave long-suffering, consider-
ateness, the charity which ' beareth all things, believeth all
things, hopeth all things,' with all the art of the moral
physician, out of account in our estimate of the realisation
of the soul's powers, can we question the greater fulness of
the realisation in the present life of Christendom, as com-
pared with the highest life of the ancient world.
259. It is a consequence of this change in the realities
of social life that the conception of moral heroism has
greatly widened— widened not in the sense of more attenu-
ated abstraction but of more concrete filling — so that it
requires some patience of reflection to trace the identity of
principle through all its forms. The Quaker philanthropist
can scarcely recognise a brother in the citizen-soldier, or the
soldier a brother in the philanthropist. It is indeed in one
sense a new type of virtue that has come into being with the
recognition of the divine image, of spiritual functions and
possibilities, in all forms of weak and suffering humanity.
The secondary motives, which assist self-devotion in war or
in the performance of functions of recognised utility be-
fore the eyes of fellow-citizens, are absent when neither from
the recipients of the service done nor from any spectators of
it can any such praise be forthcoming as might confirm in
the agent the consciousness of doihg nobly. Yet every day
and all about us pain is being endured and fear resisted
in rendering such service. The hopelessly sick are being
tended ; the foolish and ignorant are being treated as rational
persons j human beings whom a Greek would have looked
CH. v] FORTITUDE 307
on as chattels, or as a social encumbrance to be got rid of,
are having pains bestowed on them which only a faith in
unapparent possibilities of their nature could justify. In
the whole view of life which this work implies, in the objects
which inspire it, as those whom they influence would de-
scribe them, in the qualities of temper and behaviour which
it calls into play, it seems to present a strong contrast to
that which the Greek philosopher would have looked for
from his ideally brave man. It implies a view of life in which
the maintenance of any form of political society scarcely
holds a place ; in which lives that would be contemptible
and valueless, if estimated with reference to the purposes of
the state, are invested with a value of their own in virtue of
capabilities for some society not seen as yet. Its object,
whether described simply as the service of the suffering and
ignoble, or as the service of God manifested in suffering and
ignobility, is one which the philosophic Greek would scarcely
have recognised as a form of the koKov. The qualities of
self-adjustment, of sympathy with inferiors, of tolerance for
the weak and foolish, which are exercised in it, are very
different from the pride of self-sufficing strength which with
Aristotle was inseparable from heroic endurance.
260. Yet beneath these differences lies a substantial
identity. The willingness to endure even unto complete self-
renunciation, even to the point of forsaking all possibility of
pleasure, or, as Aristotle puts it, of passing the point beyond
which there seems no longer to be either good or evil ' ; the
willingness to do this in the service of the highest public
cause which the agent can conceive— whether the cause of
the state or the cause of the kingdom of Christ — because it
is part of the noble life, of the ' more excellent way,' so to
do ; this is common to the ideal of fortitude equally as
conceived by Aristotle and as it has been pursued in the
Christian Church. If we cannot ignore, on the one hand,
the limitations in Aristotle's view of the conditions under
which his ideal could be realised ' — conditions which would
' Eth. Nic. III. vi. 6 ; ix. 4, 5. ^ lb. III. vi. 7, and foil.
X 2
308 MORAL WEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. HI
have rendered it wholly unrealisable in the chief occupations
of Christian charity— oil the other hand it is only fair to
notice how free it is from debasement by any notion of a
compensation which the brave man is to find in pleasures of
another world for present endurance. The fact, indeed, that
Christian preachers have not been ashamed to dwell upon
such compensation as a motive to self-renunciation, ought
not to be taken to imply that the heroism of charity exhibited
in the Christian Church has really been vitiated by pleasure-
seeking motives. Religious rhetoric is apt to be far in arrear
of the motives which it seeks to express, and to strengthen
by expression. ' Unspeakable joys ' has been but a phrase
to convey the yearning of the soul for that perfection which
is indescribable except so far as attained. Joys that are
unspeakable are unimaginable, and the desire which really
has such joys for its object is quite different from a desire
excited by an imagination of pleasure.
In short, we are not entitled to say that the Aristotelian
ideal of fortitude has been either more or less pure than
that which has been operative in Christendom ; but there
is no doubt that the latter has become far more compre-
hensive, and it has become so in correspondence with an
enhanced fulness in our conception of the ends of living.
Faculties, dispositions, occupations, persons, of which a
Greek citizen would have taken no account, or taken
account only to despise, are now recognised as having their
place in the realisation of the powers of the human soul, in
the due evolution of the spiritual from the animal man. It
is in consequence of this recognition that the will to endure
even unto death for a worthy end has come to find worthy
ends where the Greek saw nothing but ugliness and mean-
ness, and to express itself in obscure labours of love as well
as in the splendid heroism at which a world might wonder.
261. Alongside of ' fortitude ' in the reflective morality of
Greece was placed ' temperance,' as that habit of will which
stands to the allurements of pleasure in the same relation as
' fortitude ' to pain and fear. If we wish to compare the
CH. v] TEMPERANCE AND SELF-DENIAL 309
standard of self-denial in respect of pleasures, which the
conscience of Christendom in its highest forms has come to
prescribe, with the standard recognised by the Greek phi-
losophers, it is to the account which the latter give of
aax^potnjin; that we must tum. The first impression of any
one who came to this account, having his mind charged
with the highest lessons of Christian self-denial, would be of
its great poverty — a poverty more striking, as it will probably
appear, in the case of 'temperance' than in the case of
' courage.' He finds 'temperance ' restricted by Aristotle to
control over the mere animal appetites ; or, more exactly, to
control over desire for the pleasures incidental to the satis-
faction of those appetites. The particular usage of a name,
indeed, is of slight importance. If Aristotle had reasons for
limiting o-ca^poo-wi; to a certain meaning, and made up
elsewhere for what is lacking in his account of the virtue
described under that name, no fault could be found. But
aaxpfioavvr) and avhpiia between them have to do duty for the
whole of what we understand by self-denial. However little
we may have cleared up the moral demand which we express
to ourselves as the duty of self-denial, we cannot get rid of
the conviction that it is a demand at any rate of much wider
significance in regard to indulgence in pleasures than that
which Aristotle describes as actuating the ' temperate ' man,
nor do we find the deficiency made good in any account
which he gives of other forms of virtue.
262. If we look a little closer, however, we shall notice
the identity between the habit of will of which ' temperance,'
as conceived by Aristotle, is an expression, and that on
which every renunciation of pleasures, even the widest and
completest, if it is to be of moral value, must rest. No
'ascetic' moralist, so far as known, has supposed such
renunciation to be possible, or, if possible, to be of value
merely on its own account. It becomes possible only
through the prevalence of desire for some object other than
the enjoyment of pleasure. It is this desire alone, not the
renunciation of pleasures except as an incident or sign of
310 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
such desire, that can be of moral value; just as, on the
other side, it is not desires for pleasures that are in them-
selves morally evil, but the occupation of the will by them —
the direction of a man's self to this or that pleasure as his
good — to the exclusion of those higher interests which
cannot possess the man along with them, and which can
only themselves be accounted desires for pleasure through
the fallacy, previously dwelt upon, of supposing a desire to
have for its object the pleasure of its own satisfaction.
Perhaps, under a true conviction of the essential immorality
of the pleasure-seeking character, certain moralists may have
sometimes spoken as if there were intrinsic evil in desires
for pleasure apart from their competition with other desires,
and again some intrinsic good in the renunciation of plea-
sures apart from interest in the higher object for the sake of
which they are renounced ; but this has only been through
unguardedness in expression. With Kant, for instance,
whatever his rigour in identifying moral badness with selfish-
ness and this with pleasure-seeking, it was never doubtful
that the goodness of the good will lay in the prevalence of
interest in a worthy object, badness in such a failure of the
worthy interest as enables the desire for pleasure to prevail.
His error consisted in his too abstract view of the interest
on which he held that true goodness must depend, and which
he seems to reduce to interest in the fulfilment of moral law
according to the most abstract possible conception of it. Of
this no more can be said here. For the present our concern
is to point out the agreement between the motive which the
reflective Greek regarded as the basis of the virtue mani-
fested in control over certain desires for pleasure, and the
source of that self-denial which our own consciences require
of us.
283. It must be admitted that, when Aristotle treats most
methodically of aa(j>poiTvvti, he does little to specify the par-
ticular form of that interest in the koKov which he considered
to be the basis of the virtue. He seems more intent on
specifying the psychological nature of the pleasures, over
CH. V] TEMPERANCE AND SELF-DENIAL 311
desire for which the term cra>(f>poawri, as strictly applied,
implies due control. But to a Greek who was told that the
virtue of temperance was a mastery over certain desires,
exercised toC koKov evcKo, there would be no practical doubt
what the motive was to be, what was to be the object in
which a prevailing interest was to enable him to exercise
this mastery. In his view it could only be reverence for
the divine order of the state, such a desire to fulfil his
proper function in the community as might keep under the
body and control the insolence of overweening lust. The
regime of equal law, the free combination of mutually
respecting citizens in the enactment of a common good,
was the 'beautiful thing' of which the attraction might,
through a fitting education, become so strong as to neutralise
every lust that tended to disqualify a man for the effectual
rendering of service to his state, or tempted him to deal
wantonly with his neighbour. It was this character of the
motive or interest on which it was understood to rest, that
gave to <ra^po<rimj an importance in the eyes of the Greek
moralist which, if we looked simply to the very limited range
of pleasures — pleasures of the merely animal nature — in
regard to which Aristotle supposes the 'temperate man'
to exercise self-restraint, would scarcely be intelligible. Not
the mere sobriety of the appetites, but the foundation of that
sobriety in a truly civil spirit, in the highest kind of rational
loyalty, gave the virtue its value. And hence it was —
because it was associated with such a basis— that aacppoavvri
came to be regarded as carrying with it a group of virtues
with which control of the animal impulses might seem to
us to have little to do. As it is put by a writer of the
Aristotelian school, TrapiireTai rfi (ra^poaivri eiira^ia, KoaptoTrjs,
264. When we compare this conception of ' temperance '
with the demand for self-denial which the enlightened
Christian conscience makes on itself, we are struck alike
' De virt. et vit. 1250 b. 12. 'With temperance go orderliness,
regularity, the feeling of shame, discreetness.'
312 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
with the unity of principle and the difference of range or
comprehension in the application of the principle. The
idea of the subjection in us of a lower or animal man to
a higher appeals to us as it did to the Greek. We too think
of the higher man as the law-abiding, law-reverencing man.
An abstinence or temperance dictated merely by fear of
some painful result of indulgence we do not count a virtue.
The true virtue of self-denial we deem to be only reached
when it is through interest in the performance of some
public duty or other, in the fulfilment of some function or
other which falls to us as members of a community, that
we come practically to forbid ourselves the pursuit of certain
pleasures, or to reach a state in which the prohibition is
unnecessary because the inclination to them is neutralised
by higher interests. On the other hand, we present to
ourselves the objects of moral loyalty which we should be
ashamed to forsake for our pleasures, in a far greater variety
of forms than did the Greek, and it is a much larger self-
denial which loyalty to these objects demands of us. It is
no longer the state alone that represents to us' the ' melior
natura ' before whose claims our animal inclinations sink
abashed. Other forms of association put restraints and
make demands on us which the Greek knew not. An
indulgence, which a man would otherwise allow himself, he
forgoes in consideration of claims on the part of wife or
children, of men as such or women as such, of fellow-
Christians or fellow-workmen, which • could not have been
made intelligible in the ancient world. It is easy, no doubt,
in making such comparisons to be misled by names. We
must not conclude, because to a Greek all duty was summed
up in what he owed to his irSKn, that he recognised no duties
but such as we should naturally call duties to the state.
The term ' state ' is generally used by us with a restricted
meaning which prevents it from being a proper equivalent
for noKis. But, apart from any question of names, it is
certain that the requirements founded on ideas of common
good, which in our consciences we recognise as calling for
CH. v] TEMPERANCE AND SELF-DENIAL 313
the surrender of our inclinations to pleasure, are more far-
reaching and penetrate life more deeply than did such
requirements in the ancient world, and that in consequence
a more complete self-denial is demanded of us.
265. Even if we confine our view to 'temperance' as
Aristotle conceived it, i.e. as a virtue exhibited only in deal-
ing with the pleasure tj yiverai iv airiois Kal iv ■noTois Koi rois
a(j>poSiirioK Xcyo/ievois^ — waiving the consideration of other
forms of self-denial— we shall find that the highest Greek
standard, as represented by the philosophers, falls short of
that which a conscience, duly responsive to the highest claims,
would now require of us. The principles from which it was
derived, so far as they were practically available and tenable,
seem to have been twofold. One was that all indulgence
should be avoided which unfitted a man for the discharge
of his duties in peace or war ; the other, that such a check
should be kept on the lusts of the flesh as might prevent
them from issuing in what a Greek knew as v^pts — a kind
of self-assertion, and aggression upon the rights of others in
respect of person and property, for which we have not an
equivalent name, but which was looked upon as the anti-
thesis of the civil spirit.
We speak of these as the only practically available and
tenable principles that were recognised for the regulation of
'temperance.' There is indeed another notion which is
perhaps the one most constantly and distinctly alleged by
the philosophers as a reason for being ' temperate.' This is
the notion that the kind of pleasure with which temperance
has to do is in some way unworthy of man, because one of
which the other animals are susceptible. It is not very likely,
however, to have represented a conviction of the general con-
science, nor does it appear how any practical standard of
temperance could have been derived from such a notion.
The conviction that there is a lower and a higher — that there
are objects less and more worthy of man — is no doubt one
' 'The pleasures of eating, drinking:, and sexual intercourse.' Eth.
Nic. III. X. 10.
3r4 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
of the most fundamental of our moral nature ; or rather it is
one of the simplest expressions for the demand which is that
nature. This conviction must carry with it a disapproval of
indulgences which interfere with the pursuit of the more
worthy objects — such, e.g., as disqualify for efficient citizen-
ship— but it is a false philosophical gloss on this disapproval
to treat it as grounded on the fact that these indulgences are
of a kind which are not distinctive of man, but are shared by
the ' lower animals.' Just in that respect in which they are
matter of disapproval, in so far, that is to say, as they inter-
fere with the fulfilment of some higher human function, they
are not indulgences of a kind in which the animals are found
to partake. The animals do not, so far as we know, gratify
their appetites in a way that interferes with the attainment
of any object that they are capable of presenting to them-
selves \ If the gratification of appetites, therefore, called for
our disapproval on the ground of its being common to us
with them, it should be disapproved in itself and altogether,
not on account of any obstruction which it offers to other
and higher ends (for in the case of the animals there is no
such obstruction), but on account of some intrinsic quality
belonging to it. The conclusion would be that we should
aim at an entire suppression of animal gratification^ which
would entail the extinction of the human race. We should
have no measure of excess in such gratification — for one
degree of it is no more ' brutal ' than another — but a reason,
practically inoperative, for rejecting it altogether.
On the other hand, a little consideration would show that
the attraction of pleasures, ' of which the other animals par-
take,' has really little to do with the practices condemned
by the philosophers and by our conscience as ' intemperate.'
It is probably never the pleasure of drinking, strictly so
called, that leads a man to get drunk. The mere pleasures
of eating, apart from the gratification of vanity and undefin-
able social enjoyments, have but a slight share in promoting
' So Aristotle remarks that temperance and its opposite are not
predicable of brutes. Eth. Nic. VII. vi. 6.
CH. v] TEMPERANCE AND SELF-DENIAL 315
the ' excesses of the table.' The temptations to sexual im-
morality would be much less formidable than they are, if
the attractive pleasure consisted merely in the satisfaction of
sexual appetite. Thus, without including in our conception
of intemperance any other vices than Aristotle had in view
when applying the name, we must still maintain (i) that
these vices are not in fact mainly due to the attraction of
pleasures of which other animals, so far as we know, are
susceptible, and (2) that, if they were, this would afford no
intelligible ground for treating such practices as vices, which
might not equally be urged as a reason for an abstinence
incompatible with the continuance of our race.
266. Returning, then, to those really tenable principles of
temperance, wepi airitav xai itotS>v Koi tS>v acjtpoSicriai', specified
above, with which the Greek philosophers supply us, do we
find that, as applied by the philosophers, they afford a stan-
dard of temperance adequate either to the recognised ideal,
or to the highest practice, of the modern world ? The answer
must be that on the most important point, nepi rav d(l>po8iaiav,
they do not. The limit which, on the strength of them, the
philosophers would have drawn between lawful and lawless
love, would not have been that which our consciences would
call on us to observe. It would not have excluded all indul-
gence of the sexual passion except as between man and
woman in monogamous married life. The failure, however,
was not in the intrinsic nature of the principles recognised
by the philosophers, for there is no true foundation for the
strictest sexual morality other than that social duty which
they asserted. The failure arose from the structure of exist-
ing society, which determined their application of their
principles. As we have more than once pointed out, while
there is one sense in which moral ideas must precede practice,
there is another in which they follow and depend upon it.
The moral judgment at its best in any age or country — /. e.
in those persons who are as purely interested in the perfec-
tion of mankind and as keenly alive to the conditions of that
perfection as is then possible — is still limited in many ways
3l6 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
by the degree of progress actually made towards the attain-
ment of that perfection. It was thus the actual condition of
women, the actual existence of slavery, the fact that as yet
there had been no realisation, even the most elementary, of
the idea of there being a single human family with equal
rights throughout — it was this that rendered the Greek
philosophers incapable of such an idea of chastity as any
unbrutalised English citizen, whatever his practice, if he
were honest with himself would acknowledge. To outrage
the person of a fellow-citizen, to violate the sanctity of his
family rights, was for the Greek as much as for us a blamable
intemperance. In the eye of the philosophers it meant a sub-
jection of the higher, or civil, or law-reverencing, man to that
lower man in us which knows not law ; and they were quite
aware that not merely the abstinence from such acts, but the
conquest of the lusts which lead to them by a higher interest,
was the condition of true virtue. To the spirit of our Lord's
re-enactment of the seventh commandment in the sermon on
the Mount, to the substitution of the rule of the pure heart
for that of mere outward observance, they were no strangers.
What they had still to learn was not that the duty of chastity,
like any other, was to be fulfilled from the heart and with a
pure will, but the full extent of that duty.
267. And this they failed to appreciate because the prac-
tical realisation of the possibilities of mankind in society
had not then reached a stage in which the proper and equal
sacredness of all women, as self-determining and self-
respecting persons, could be understood. Society was not
in a state in whicli the principle that humanity in the person
of every one is to be treated always as an end, never merely
as a means, could be apprehended in its full universality;
and it is this principle alone, however it may be stated,
which affords a rational ground for the obligation to chastity
as we understand it. The society of modern Christendom,
it is needless to say, is far enough from acting upon it, but
in its conscience it recognises the principle as it was not
recognised in the ancient world. The legal investment of
CH. v] TEMPERANCE AND SELF-DENIAL 317
every one with personal rights makes it impossible for one
whose mind is open to the claims of others to ignore the
wrong of treating a woman as the servant of his pleasures at
the cost of her own degradation. Though the wrong is still
habitually done, it is done under a rebuke of conscience of
which a Greek of Aristotle's time, with most women about
him in slavery, and without even the capacity (to judge from
the writings of the philosophers) for an ideal of society in
which this should be otherwise, could not have been sensible.
The sensibility could only arise in sequence upon that
change in the actual structure of society through which the
human person, as such, without distinction of sex, became
the subject of rights. That change was itself, indeed, as
has been previously pointed out in this treatise, the embodi-
ment of a demand which forms the basis of our moral
nature — the demand on the part of the individual for a good
which shall be at once his own and the good of others. But-
this demand needed to take effect in laws and institutions
which give every one rights against every one, before the
general conscience could prescribe such a rule of chastity,
founded on the sacredness of the persons of women, as we
acknowledge. And just as it is through an actual change
in the structure of society that our ideal in this matter has
come to be more exacting than that of the Greek philoso-
phers, so it is only through a further social change that we
can expect a more general conformity to the ideal to be
arrived at. Only as the negative equality before the law,
which is already established in Christendom, comes to be
supplemented by a more positive equality of conditions and
a more real possibility for women to make their own career in
life, will the rule of chastity, which our consciences acknow-
ledge, become generally enforced in practice through the more
universal refusal of women to be parties to its violation.
268. In this matter of chastity, then, there is a serious
inferiority of the highest Greek ideal to the highest ideal
of Christendom, but it is important to notice where the
inferiority lies. We have no right to disparage the Greek
3l8 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
ideal on the ground of any inferiority in the motive which
the Greek philosophers would have considered the true
basis of this, as of every, form of temperance. There can
be no higher motive to it than that civil spirit, in the fullest
and truest sense, on which they conceived it to rest. But
we may fairly disparage their ideal in respect of the kind of
life which the realisation of this motive was considered to
require. The sexual temperance which they demanded,
they demanded on the true ground, but not in full enough
measure. In that respect their ideal had certain inevitable
shortcomings — inevitable, because no ideal can go more
than a certain distance, in the detail of conduct which it
requires, beyond the conditions of the given age.
And this comparative poverty of the Greek ideal becomes
more apparent when we reflect that, as has been pointed out
above, the only form in which the virtuous., renunciation of
pleasures presents itself to the philosophers is that of tem-
perance irepi a-iriav Kal ttotSiv Kai rav d<j)poSi(Tia>v. Temperance,
thus limited, has in their systems to do duty for the whole
of what we should call self-denial. Under no other title
than that of the a-axppav is the self-denying man described
by the philosophers. And it may fairly be argued that, in
respect of the governing principle of the will, the aa>(l)pav,
as they conceive him, does not differ from the highest type
of self-denial known to Christian society. But the range of
action which they looked for from him, as the expression
of this principle, was very limited in comparison with the
forms of self-denial with which we are practically familiar ;
and it was so limited because great part of the objects, by
which in the society of modern Christendom self-denial is in
fact elicited, in Greek society was not there to elicit it.
269. If we consider, in regard to any person whom we
credit with a high degree of habitual self-denial, what are
the pleasures which we suppose him to deny himself, it
will appear that those, in relation to which alone Aristotle
supposed ' temperance ' to be exercised, form a very small
part of them. In determining the province of ' temperance '
CH.V] TEMPERANCE AND SELF-DENIAL 319
Aristotle, following the psychology of Plato ', expressly ex-
cludes two kinds of pleasure: (i) 'pleasures of the soul,'
as instances of which he gives the pleasures of gratified
ambition and love of learning; (2) such 'pleasures of the
body ' as are received through the senses of hearing, sight,
or smell. It is not such pleasures as these that the tem-
perate man forgoes. Now, as has been already said, this
exclusion would be a very small matter if it merely con-
cerned the usage of the name ' temperance.' The important
point is that the ancient philosophers seemingly give no
place to that type of virtuous character in which devotion to
some form of true good leads to a renunciation of such
pleasures as those included in the above classes. Yet it is
just such pleasures as these of which the renunciation is
involved in that self-denial which in our impartial and un-
sophisticated judgment we most admire — that which in our
consciences we set before ourselves as the highest ideal. It
would seem no great thing to us that in the service of man-
kind one should confine himself to necessary food and
drink, and should observe the strictest limitations of Chris-
tian morality in the matter of sexual indulgence ; and it is
such indulgence alone, we must remember, not the enjoy-
ments of family life, that would fall within the class of
pleasures in which, according to the Greek philosophers,
temperance is exercised. We have examples about us of
much severer sacrifice. There are men, we know, who with
the keenest sensibility to such pleasures as those of ' gratified
ambition and love of learning,' yet deliberately forgo them ;
who shut themselves out from an abundance of aesthetic
enjoyments which would be open to them, as well as from
those of family life ; and who do this in order to meet the
claims which the work of realising the possibilities of the
human soul in society — a work a hundred-fold more com-
plex as it presents itself to us than as it presented itself to
Aristotle — seems to make upon them. Such sacrifices are
made now, as they were not made in the days of the Greek
1 Eth. Nic. III. X. 2, 3; Plato, Philebus, 51.
320 MORAL ID&AL AND MOIiAL PliOGRESS [B^.iil
philosophers, and in that sense a higher type of living is
known among us ; not because there are men now more
ready to fulfil recognised duties than there were then, but
because with the altered structure of society men have
become alive to claims to which, with the most open eye
and heart, they could not be alive then.
270. To an ancient Greek a society composed of a small
group of freemen, having recognised claims upon each other
and using a much larger body of men with no such recog-
nised claims as instruments in their service, seemed the
only possible society. In such an order of things those calls
could not be heard which evoke the sacrifices constantly
witnessed in the nobler lives of Christendom, sacrifices which
would be quite other than they are, if they did not involve
the renunciation of those ' pleasures of the soul ' and ' un-
mixed pleasures,' as they were reckoned in the Platonic
psychology, which it did not occur to the philosophers that
there could be any occasion in the exercise of the highest
virtue to forgo. The calls for such sacrifice arise from that
enfranchisement of all men which, though in itself but
negative' in its nature, carries with it for the responsive con-
science a claim on the part of all men to such positive help
from all men as is needed to make their freedom real. Where
the Greek saw a supply of possibly serviceable labour, having
no end or function but to be made really serviceable to the
privileged few, the Christian citizen sees a multitude of
persons, who in their actual present condition may have no
advantage over the slaves of an ancient state, but who in
undeveloped possibility, and in the claims which arise out
of that possibility, are all that he himself is. Seeing this,
he finds a necessity laid upon him. It is no time to enjoy
the pleasures of eye and ear, of search for knowledge, of
friendly intercourse, of applauded speech or writing, while the
mass of men whom we call our brethren, and whom we declare
to be meant with us for eternal destinies, are left without
' Negative, because amounting merely to the denial to any one of
a right to use others as his instruments or property.
CH.v] TEMPERANCE AND SELF-DENIAL 321
the chance, which only the help of others can gain for them,
of making themselves in act what in possibility we believe
them to be. Interest in the problem of social deliverance,
in one or other of the innumerable forms in which it pre-
sents itself to us, but in which it could not present itself
under such a state of society as that contemplated by the
Greek, forbids a surrender to enjoyments which are not
incidental to that work of deliverance, whatever the value
which they, or the activities to which they belong, might
otherwise have.
271. There thus arise those forms of self-denial which did
not enter within the horizon of the ancient moralists, and in
which, if anywhere, we are entitled to trace the ethical progress
of our own age. Questions whether we are better than our
fathers are idle enough, but it is not so idle — indeed it is
a necessity of our moral nature — to endeavour, through what-
ever darkness and discouragement, to trace 'some increasing
purpose through the ages,' of which the gradual fulfilment
elicits a fuller exertion of the moral capabilities of individuals.
Such a purpose we may not unreasonably hold to be directed
to the development of society into a state in which all human
beings shall be treated as, actually or in promise, persons —
as agents of whom each is an end equally to himself and to
others. The idea of a society of free and law-abiding persons,
each his own master yet each his brother's keeper, was first
definitely formed among the Greeks, and its formation was
the condition of all subsequent progress in the direction
described; but with theni, as has been often enough remarked,
it was limited in its application to select groups of men
surrounded by populations of aliens and slaves. In its
universality, as capable of application to the whole human
race, an attempt has first been made to act upon it in modern
Christendom. With every advance towards its universal
application comes a complication of the necessity, under
which the conscientious man feels himself placed, of sacri-
ficing personal pleasure in satisfaction of the claims of human
brotherhood. On the one side the freedom of every one to
Y
322 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
shift for himself — a freedom to a great extent really secured
— on the other, the responsibility of every one for every one,
acknowledged by the awakened conscience ; these together
form a moral situation in which the good citizen has no leisure
to think of developing in due proportion his own faculties of
enjoyment. The will to be good is not purer or stronger in
him than it must have been in any Greek who came near to
the philosopher's ideal, but the recognition of new social
claims compels its exercise in a new and larger self-denial.
272. An objection, indeed, is pretty sure to be made to
the whole principle upon which we reckon such self-denial
as is here contemplated a higher virtue than entered into
the Greek ideal. ' Are we entitled,' it may be asked, ' to
make a virtue out of the renunciation of anything intrin-
sically good, and are not the pleasures which we suppose
to be renounced by the self-denying servant of mankind
intrinsically good? We may indeed, upon the principles
of " universalistic Hedonism," admire the conduct of such
a person, as suited to the times of present distress. The
general capacity for pleasure being so Umited by the faulty
conditions of society, we may admit it to be the best thing
in the long run that there should be men ready to forgo the
most really desirable pleasures for the sake of rendering
others ultimately more capable of them. The public spirit,
the altruistic enthusiasm, of such men is of great value,
as a means to the end which consists in the maximum of
pleasure obtainable by human (or perhaps all sentient)
bdngs, taken together; and for that reason it is rightly
counted virtuous. But it is not more virtuous in proportion
to the amount and desirability of the pleasure sacrificed by
those under its influence ; nor is it any inferiority of the
Greek ideal of virtue to that here put forward as character-
istic of modern Christendom, that it did not imply any
sacrifice of "pure" pleasures, /.«. of such pleasures as carry
no pain in their train. It would be another matter if it could
be alleged against the Greek ideal that it did not imply
public spirit ; but this is not pretended. The fault alleged
CH. v] TEMPERANCE AND SELF-DENIAL 323
is merely that public spirit, as the Greek conceived it,
involved a less costly sacrifice on the part of the individual
than do those forms of altruistic enthusiasm to which we are
now taught to aspire. But if the allegation is true, so much
the better for the Greek ideal. If the conditions of modern
life are such that the completest fulfilment of social duty
does often call for the renunciation of much pure pleasure
on the part of the individual, this may put difficulties in the
way of an optimistic view of human history, but it cannot
make the ideal of virtue as more painful higher than the
ideal of it as more pleasant. The only pleasures of which
a limitation is properly included in the conception of the
highest virtue, are those of which the enjoyment beyond a
certain point either interferes with the individual's health, and
thus with his capacity for other enjoyment, or involves some
aggression upon the rights of others, and thus lessens the pos-
sibiHty of enjoyment on their part. It was just these plea-
sures of which a due limitation was taken to be implied in that
constituent of the virtuous character which the ancients call
temperance. It was not their defect, but their merit, that
they did not conceive the highest virtue to involve properly
a rejection of normal pleasures of any other kind.'
273. From the point of view of Hedonistic Utilitarianism
such an objection is inevitable and unanswerable. It is
well to allow full weight to it, were it only for the sake of
forcing ourselves to consider whether the actual admiration
of our consciences, which we can hardly doubt is most fully
commanded by the life of the largest self-denial, is in accord
with such Utilitarianism. The answer which must be given
to it, according to the theory previously set forth in this
treatise, can easily be anticipated. It is not because it
involves the renunciation of so much pleasure that we deem
the life of larger self-denial, which the Christian conscience
calls for, a higher life than was conceived of by the Greek
philosophers; but because it implies a fuller realisation
of the capacities of the human soul. It is not the renun-
ciation, as such, but the spiritual state which it represents,
y 2
324 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
that constitutes the value of the life spent in self-devoted
service to mankind ; and it represents, we must remember,
not merely a certain system of desires and interests, on the
part of the persons who make the renunciation, but a certain
social development in consequence of which those desires
and interests are called into play.
As we have seen, it is the emancipation of the multitude,
and the social situations arising out of it, that call forth the
energies of the self-denying life as we now witness it. When
we compare the realisation of human capabilities implied
in that life with the realisation of them implied in the
highest type of citizenship contemplated by the ancient
philosophers, we must take account not merely of some
typical representative of Christian charity on the one side,
and of the ideal Greek citizen on the other, each in his
separate individuality, but of the moral and spiritual con-
ditions of other men, to which these several types of
character are relative. For it is human society as a whole
that we must look upon as the organism in which the
capacities of the human soul are unfolded. Human society
indeed is essentially a society of self-determined persons.
There can be no progress of society which is not a develop-
ment of capacities on the part of persons composing it,
considered as ends in themselves. But in estimating the
worth of any type of virtue, as implying or tending to bring
about a realisation of man's spiritual capacities, we must not
confine our view to some particular group of men exhibiting
the virtue. We must consider also those relations between
them and other men, by which the particular type of virtue
is determined. We must enquire whether any apparent
splendour in that virtue is due to a degradation of human
society outside the particular group, or whether, on the
contrary, the virtue of the few takes its character from their
assistance in the struggle upward of the many.
274. Now, when we compare the life of service to man-
kind, involving so much sacrifice of pure pleasure, which
is lived by the men whom in our consciences we think best.
CH. v] TEMPERANCE AND SELF-DENIAL 335
and which they reproach themselves for not making one
of more complete self-denial, with the life of free activity in
bodily and intellectual exercises, in friendly converse, in civil
debate, in the enjoyment of beautiful sights and sounds,
which we commonly ascribe to the Greeks, and which their
philosophers certainly set before them as an ideal, we might
be apt, on the first view, to think that, even though measured
not merely by the quantity of pleasure incidental to it but
by the fulness of the realisation of human capabilities
implied in it, the latter kind of life was the higher of the two.
Man for man, the Greek who at all came up to the ideal
of the philosophers might seem to be intrinsically a nobler
being — one of more fully developed powers — than the self-
mortifying Christian, upon whom the sense of duty to a suffer-
ing world weighs too heavily to allow of his giving free play to
enjoyable activities, of which he would otherwise be capable.
But such a comparison of man with man, in abstraction
from the rest of mankind, is not the way to ascertain the
real value of the virtue of either in its relation to the
possibilities of the human soul. If (as would seem to be
the case) the free play of spiritual activity in the life of the
Greek citizen, with its consequent bright enjoyableness,
depended partly on the seclusion of the Greek communities
from the mass of mankind, partly on their keeping in slavery
so much of the mass as was in necessary contact with them ;
if the seclusion and the slavery were incidental to a state of
things in which the powers of the human soul, considered
as the soul of universal human society, were still in their
nonage ; then, whatever value we may ascribe to the highest
type of Greek life, as suggesting an ideal of ' liberty, equality
and fraternity,' afterwards to be realised on a wider scale, we
cannot regard its exemption from the impeding cares, which
the intercommunication of mankind on terms of recognised
equality brings with it, as constituting a real superiority.
275. Though it is not to be pretended, then, that the
life of the self-denying Christian citizen is morally the better
on account of the burden of care and the manifold limitations,
326 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
which the acknowledged claims of human brotherhood im-
pose on it, it must be maintained on the other hand that
the life of the Greek citizen was not morally the better for
the freedom from such burden and limitations which he
enjoyed ; because this freedom was correlative to an unde-
veloped condition on the part of the rest of mankind. The
title of the modern or Christian type of virtue to a positive
superiority is not to be found in the burden, unknown to
the Greeks, which it bears, but in that which the presence
of this burden implies ; the new spiritual activity, namely,
on the part of the multitude, now conscious of their claims
and set free to assert them practically, and the wider range
of interests in human good which in response to those claims
are awakened in the hearts of the virtuous. That this
enhanced activity, these enlarged interests, should involve
for the virtuous much voluntary curtailment of the innocent
pleasures which, but for such disturbing claims and interests,
would be open to them, is, as regards the attainment of moral
good, a matter of indifference. For the curtailment in itself
they are neither the better nor the worse ; but in the actual
order of things, so far as appears, it is a necessary incident of
progress towards that full development of what man has it
in him to be, that satisfaction of the demand of the human
soul for its own perfection, which is for us the good ; and for
that reason it is the part of the highest virtue to welcome it.
276. We may speculate, indeed, on the possibility of a
state of things in which the most entire devotion to the
service of mankind shall be compatible with the widest
experience of pleasure on the part of the devoted person.
We may argue that the perfection of the human soul implies
its unimpeded activity, which is pleasure ; and that there-
fore, though in certain stages of the progress towards such
perfection there may be for certain persons an abridgment
of pleasure, its attainment must be pure enjoyment. Or
again we may comfort ourselves with surmising that, though
to this or that individual citizen his self-devotedness may
mean a large sacrifice of pleasure, yet to others, who have
CH. v] TEMPERANCE AND SELF-DENIAL 327
the benefit of his devotion without sharing in it, there is in
consequence such an accession of pleasure that the result is
a large addition to the sum of enjoyment on the whole.
All speculation of this kind, however, provokes much
counter-speculation. By what right, it may be asked, do
we assume that the more developed or perfect state of the
human soul is one in which a larger aggregate of pleasure
is enjoyed than in the less perfect state ? There is pleasure,
no doubt, in all satisfaction of desire, there is pleasure in
all unimpeded activity. So far therefore, as a man has
desired the perfection of the human soul, th^re will be plea-
sure to him in the consciousness of contributing to that
perfection, but not necessarily a greater amount than he has
to forgo in order to the contribution. So far as the perfec-
tion is attained, again, there will be less impediment to the
activity directed to its attainment, and therefore more plea-
sure in the exercise of the activity. But it would seem at
least possible that, according to the plan of the world, the
perfection of the human soul may involve the constant
presence of a lower nature, consisting in certain tendencies,
never indeed dominant, but in conflict with which alone
the higher energies of man can emerge. In that case it may
very well be that the desire for human perfection, which is
the desire for true good, though gradually coming to taste
more of the particular pleasure incidental to its satisfaction
and to the free play of the action which it moves, as it more
fully attains its end, may never be destined to carry men,
even in its fullest satisfaction, into a state of pure enjoy-
ment, or into one in which they will be exempt from large
demands for the rejection of possible pleasure.
277. At any rate, whatever may be the future in store
for it, we should scarcely question the loss of otherwise
possible pleasure which the dominance of such a desire
entails on those who are possessed by it, were it not for the
confusion which leads us to assume that the satisfaction of
a strongest desire must always convey to the subject of it
a pleasure greater than any which he would otherwise have
328 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
enjoyed. It is true, of course, that for any one in whom
the desire for goodness or the love of mankind, or however
else we may describe the impulse to a life of sacrifice, is
really the dominant motive, it would be impossible really to
enjoy those pleasures, however innocent, which interfere with
his giving effect to the desire and which he rejects for that
reason. But it does not follow from this that he would not
have had more enjoyment on the Ayhole if the dominant
desire had been different, and if he had been free to take
his fill of the innocent pleasures from which it has withheld
him. According to all appearances and any fair interpreta-
tion of them, he certainly would have had more.
Whether the loss of pleasure in the life of such a man
through the disturbing action of his altruistic enthusiasm is
or is not compensated by a consequent accession of pleasure
to others, who have the benefit of the results of his en-
thusiasm without sharing in the disturbance or self-denialj
may be more open to doubt. If our nature were such that
the saint or reformer could set himself to confer happiness
on others without seeking to communicate a character like
his own ; if we could take advantage of the services of such
an one without admiring and aspiring in some measure to
become like him, the gain to the general sum of pleasures
as the result of his activity would be less doubtful than it is.
But if, as we must hold to be the case, the character and
activity of the altruistic enthusiast, under ordinary conditions
of temperament and circumstance, is not preponderatingly
pleasure-giving to the enthusiast himself; and if his effect
upon others is always in greater or less degree to disturb
their acquiescence in the life of ordinary enjoyment ; then
the case is at least not clear in favour of the assumption
that the effect of such a character and activity is an addition
to the aggregate of human pleasure, one man taken with
another. He must be much stiffened in hedonistic theory
who could maintain that the life which ended on the cross
was one of more enjoyment than that which would have
been open to the Crucified but for the purpose which led
CH. v] GREEK AND MODERN IDEALS OF VIRTUE 329
to this end ; and the Crucified himself foresaw that he came
not to send peace on earth but a sword. It would be un-
warrantable indeed to found a general ethical argument on
this example, but it may be fairly used to bring home to our
minds that question as to the suflficiency of the hedonistic
justification of the self-denying life, which is all that it would
be to our purpose here to suggest.
278. These considerations have arisen from our noticing
that the practical attitude towards pleasures, which in our
consciences we regard as belonging to the highest virtue, is
one of larger renunciation than was contemplated by the
Greek philosophers as entering into the ideal of virtue. In
this respect we claim a superiority for the modern or Chris-
tian ideal, independently of all attempts to show that con-
duct in accordance with it is more productive of pleasure in
the long run or to mankind on the whole. The success of
such attempts we hold to be at least very questionable. It is
not by their aid that we seek to show the more self-denying
(or pleasure-renouncing) type of virtue to be the higher ; nor,
on the other hand, is this view founded on any impression
that a virtue is more of a virtue for being painful. We give
the advantage to the Christian type because it implies,
directly on the part of those by whom it is exhibited, a
wider range of interest and activity in the work of perfecting
mankind, and indirectly, on the part of the multitude by
whose claims it is elicited, a liberation of their powers un-
known to the ancient world.
279. This conclusion, it will be remembered, has been
arrived at in the process of comparing those manifestations
of the good will which the Greek philosophers presented to
themselves, under the names avSpfia and o-wi^poo-ui'i;, as
specially related to the endurance of pain and the rejection
of certain pleasures for worthy objects, with the self-denying
disposition which our consciences acknowledge as the best.
In the root of the matter the Greek conception of these
virtues is thoroughly sound. They are consideired genuine
330 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. hi
only when resting on a pure and good will, which is a will to
be good — a will directed not to anything external, or anything
in respect of which it is passive, but to its own perfection, to
the attainment of what is noblest in human character and
action. In this respect that which we may call, after its first
clear enunciators, the Platonic or Aristotelian conception of
virtue, as has been said above, is final. It marks the great
transition, whenever and however achieved, in the develop-
ment of the idea of true good from the state of mind in which
it is conceived as a well-being more or less independent of
what a man is in himself, to that in which it is conceived as
a well-being constituted by character and action. Its defects,
as compared with the standard which we now acknowledge,
arose from the actual shortcoming in the then achievement
of the human soul — the soul of human society — as compared
with that of which we are ourselves partakers.
As has been previously pointed out, an explicit or reflec-
tive ideal ' of the true good, or of virtue as a habit of will
directed to it, can only follow upon a practical pursuit of the
good, arising indeed out of the same spiritual demand which
is the source of the ideal, but not yet consciously regulated
by any theoretical form of it. In this pursuit have arisen
institutions and arrangements of life, social requirements and
expectations, conventional awards of praise and blame. It
is in reflection upon these — in the effort to extract some
common meaning from them, to reject what is temporary
and accidental in them, while retaining what is essential —
that there is formed such an explicit ideal of the good and
of virtue as we find in the Greek philosophers. Any one
who really conformed to their ideal of virtue would, no doubt,
have lived a better life than any one was actually living, be-
cause he would have been pursuing, sustainedly and upon
a principle of which he was aware, a line of conduct which
in fact the best men were only pursuing with frequent lapses
through defect either of will or judgment. But in their
determinate conception or filling up of the ideal, and in
' I.e. an ideal which the persons affected by it have reflected on.
CH. v] GREEK AND MODERN IDEALS OF VIRTUE 331
their consequent conception of the sort of behaviour in which
the virtuous will was to be exhibited, they were necessarily
limited by the actual state of human society. 'Human
brotherhood' had no meaning for them. They had no
adequate notion of the claims in response to which the good
will should be exercised. In respect of the institutions and
arrangements of life, of the social requirements, etc., just
spoken of, a great range of new experience has come into
being for us which did not exist for them. The soul of
human society has realised its capacities in new ways. We
know that it can achieve, because it has done so, much of
which the Greek philosophers did not dream.
280. Hence has resulted a change in the ideal of what
its full realisation would be, and consequently a change in
the conception of what is required from the individual as
a contribution to that realisation. In particular the idea has
been formed of the possible inclusion of all men in one
society of equals, and much has been actually done towards
its realisation. For those citizens of Christendom on whom
the idea of Christendom has taken hold, such a society does
actually exist. For them— according to their conscientious
conviction, if not according to their practice — mankind is
a society of which the members owe reciprocal services to
each other, simply as man to maiL And the idea of this
social unity has been so far realised that the modern state,
unlike the ancient, secures equality before the law to all
persons living within the territory over which its jurisdiction
extends, and in theory at least treats aliens as no less possessed
of rights. Thus when we come to interpret that formal
definition of the good, as a realisation of the powers of the
human soul or the perfecting of man, which is true for us
as for Aristotle, into that detail in which alone it can afford
guidance for the actions of individuals, the particular inj&hc-
tions which we derive from it are in many ways different from
any that Aristotle could have thought of. For us as for him
the good for the individual is to be good, and to be good is
to contribute in some way disinterestedly, or for the sake of
332 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
doing it, to the perfecting of man. But when we ask ourselves
how we should thus contribute, or what are the particular
forms of virtuous life to which we should aspire, our answer
is determined by the consciousness of claims upon us on the
part of other men which, as we now see, must be satisfied in
order to any perfecting of the human soul, but which were
not, and in the then state of society could not be, recognised
by the Greek philosophers. It is the consciousness of such
claims that makes the real difference between what our con-
sciences require of us, or our standards of virtue, and the
requirements or standards which Greek Ethics represent.
281. It must be borne in mind, however, that the social
development, which has given the idea of human brother-
hood a hold on our consciences such as it could not have
for the Greeks, would itself have been impossible but for the
action of that idea of the good and of goodness which first
found formal expression in the Greek philosophers. It
implies interest in an object which is common to all men in
the proper sense, — in the sense, namely, that there can be
no competition for its attainment between man and man;
and the only interest that satisfies this condition is the
interest, under some form or other, in the perfecting of man
or the realisation of the powers of the human soul. It is
not to be pretended, indeed, that this in its purity, or apart
from other interests, has been the only influence at work in
maintaining and extending social union. It is obvious, for
instance, that trade has played an important part in bringing
and keeping men together; and trade is the offspring of
other interests than that just described. The force of con
quest, again, such as that which led to the establishment for
some centuries of the ' Pax Romana ' round the basin of the
Mediterranean, has done much to break down estranging
demarcations between different groups of men; and conquest
has generally originated in selfish passions. But neither trade
nor conquest by themselves would have helped to widen the
comprehension of political union, to extend the range within
which reciprocal claims are recognised of man on man, and
CH.V] GREEK AND MODERN IDEALS OF VIRTUE 333
ultimately to familiarise men with the idea of human brother-
hood. For this there must have been another interest at
work, applying the immediate results of trade and conquest
to other ends than those which the trader and conqueror had
in view ; the interest in being good and doing good. Apart
from this, other interests might tend to combine certain men
for certain purposes and for a time, but because directed to
objects which each desires for himself alone and not for
another— objects which cannot really be attained in common
•^they divide in spirit, even when they combine temporarily
in outward effect ; and, sooner or later, the spiritual division
must make its outward sign.
282. It is sometimes supposed, indeed, that desires of
which the object on each man's part is his own pleasure,
may gradually produce a universal harmony and adjustment
of claims, as it comes to be discovered that the means by
which each may get most pleasure for himself are also the
means which serve to yield most pleasure to every one else.
The acceptance of this view probably arises from a combina-
tion of two notions ; one, the notion that in the long run,
or on the whole, the greatest amount of pleasure results to
each individual from that order of life and society which
yields most pleasure in the long run to every other individual ;
the other, the notion that a man's desire for pleasure is or
may become a desire for pleasure on the whole, as distinct
from any particular pleasure. Putting these two notions
together, we conclude that men, having no other motive
than desire for pleasure, may, after sufficient experience, be
led by their several desires each to act in a way productive
of most pleasure to all the rest.
But while the first of these notions is fairly arguable, the
second is certainly false. To be actuated by a desire for
pleasure is to be actuated by a desire for some specific
pleasure to be enjoyed by oneself. No two or more persons
whose desires were only of this kind could really desire any-
thing in common. Under the given institutions of society
one man's desire for pleasure may, no doubt, lead to a
334 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
course of action which will incidentally produce pleasure to
another ; as in trade, when A's desire for the pleasure to be
got by the possession of some article leads him to give B
a price for it, which enables B in turn to obtain some plea-
sure that he desires. But even in this case it is clear not
only that the desires of A and B, as desires for pleasures,
are not directed to a common object, but that, if left to
their natural course, they would lead to] conflict. A desires
the pleasure which he obtains by buying the article of B,
but {qua desiring pleasure) he does not desire, he has an
aversion to, the loss of means to other pleasures involved in
paying a price for it. He only pays the price, and so
adjusts his desire for pleasure to B's, because under the
given social order he can obtain the article in no other way.
The desires, in short, of different men, so far as directed
each to some pleasure, are in themselves tendencies to con-
flict between man and man. In many cases, through the
action of society, there has come to be some established
means of compromise between them, such as that of buying
and selling ; but the cases in which no such settled means
of compromise is available, and in which therefore A'cannot
gratify his particular desire for pleasure without depriving B
of the chance of gratifying his, occur constantly enough to
show us what is the natural tendency of a desire for pleasure,
if left to itself*.
' Kant (Werke, ed. Rosenkranz, viii. p. 138) illustrates the fallacy,
as he considers it, of supposing that a moral harmony can result from
the desire on the part of each man for his own greatest pleasure, by the
story of the pledge given by King Francis to the Emperor Charles,
' was mein Bruder Karl haben will (Mailand), das will ich auch haben.'
It will naturally be retorted on Kant that the illustration is inapt,
because, while Charles and Francis could not each possess the duchy
of Milan, the pleasures desired by men of well-regulated minds, are
such that each can gratify his desire without interfering with the
gratification of the other. On reflection, however, it will appear that
this possibility of adjusting the desires for pleasure of different men
(as in buying and selling) depends on the presence of controlling
agencies which are themselves not the product of desires for plea-
sures ; and that on the estranging tendency of these desires, if left to
CH. v] GREEK AND MODERN IDEALS OF VIRTUE 335
283. If we are enquiring, then, for an interest adequate
to account for the existence of an ever-widening social union,
in which the claims of all are acknowledged by the loyal
citizen as the measure of what he may claim for himself, it
is not in the desire for pleasure that we can find it, or in
those 'particular passions,' such as ambition, which are
wrongly supposed to have pleasure for their object, but
which resemble the desire for pleasure in being directed to
some object private in each case to the person under the
influence of the passion. Given a social authority strong
enough to insist on respect for general convenience in the
individual's pursuit of his ends, and minded to do so, then
desire for pleasure, aversion from pain, and the various
egoistic passions, may adjust themselves to its requirements
and even be enlisted in its service ; but they cannot be the
source of such an authority. It can have its origin only in
an interest of which the object is a common good ; a good
in the effort after which there can be no competition between
man and man ; of which the pursuit by any individual is an
equal service to others and to himself. Such a good may
be pursued in many different forms by persons quite uncon-
scious of any community in their pursuits ; by the craftsman
or writer, set upon making his work as good as he can
themselves, Kant Is substantially right. There are, no doubt, social
pleasures, pleasures which are like all others in that each man who
desires them desires them for himself alone, but which can only be
enjoyed in company, and which therefore bring men together. But
though desires for such pleasures might lead men to associate temporarily
for the purpose of their gratification, the association would itself tend
to bring them into collision with other men associated for a like pur-
pose, and would be hable to perpetual disruption, as desires for plea-
sures of a different kind arose in the persons so associated. There are
also pleasures, such as the enjoyment of the common air and sunshine,
of which the sources cannot be appropriated, and for which therefore,
under the simplest conditions of life, the desire as entertained by
different men cannot tend to conflict. Under any other conditions,
however, the opportunity for enjoying such pleasures, though not the
sources of them, would become matter of competition, and thereupon
the desire even for them would become a tendency to conflict.
33^ MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. Ill
without reference to his own glorification; by the father
devoted to the education of his family, or the citizen devoted
to the service of his state. No one probably can present to
himself the manner of its pursuit, as it must have been pur-
sued in order to the formation of the most primitive tribal
or civil society. If we would find an expression applicable
to it in all its forms, ' the realisation of the capacities of the
human soul,' or ' the perfecting of man,' seems best suited
for the purpose. To most men, indeed, engaged in the
pursuit of any common good, this expression might convey
no meaning. Nevertheless it is as part of, or as contributing
to, such a realisation, that the object of their pursuit has its
attraction for them ; and it is for the same reason that it has
the characteristic described, of being an object for which
there can be no competition between man and man, and of
which the pursuit is of general service.
284. Of such a good there had, of course, been pursuit
ages before the Greek philosophers began to reflect on it
and seek to define it. A proof of this was the very existence
of the communities in which the philosophers lived, and of
which they themselves only professed to explain the true
idea. But it is one thing for men to be actuated by an
inward demand for — to make spiritual effort after — a good
which in its intrinsic nature is universal or common to all
men; another thing for them to conceive it in its uni-
versality. It was because it helped men to such a con-
ception of the good in its universality that the teaching of
the philosophers was of so much practical importance in
the social history of man. The Greek citizen who loyally
served his state, or sought to know the truth for its own
sake, was striving for a good not private to himself but in
its own nature universal; yet he had no notion of there
being any identity in the ends of living, for himself on the
one side, and for slaves and barbarians on the other. The
philosophers themselves — such was the practical limitation
of their view by the conditions of life around them — would
not have told him that there was. But when they told him
CH. v] GREEK AND MODERN IDEALS OF VIRTVE 337
that the object of his life should be duly to fulfil his function
as a man, or to contribute to a good consisting in a realisa-
tion of the soul's faculties, they were directing him to an
object which in fact was common to him with all men, with-
out possibility of competition for it, without distinction of
Greek or barbarian, bond or'free. Their teaching was thus,
in its own nature, of a kind to yield a social result which they
did not themselves contemplate, and which tended to make
good the practical shortcomings of their teaching itself.
285. It would not be to the purpose here to enter on
the complicated and probably unanswerable question of the
share which different personal influences may have had in
gaining acceptance for the idea of human brotherhood, and
in giving it some practical effect in the organisation of
society. We have no disposition to hold a brief for the
Greek philosophers against the founders of the Christian
Church, or for the latter against the former. All that it
is sought to maintain is this ; that the society of which we
are consciously members — a society founded on the self-
subordination of each individual to the rational claims of
others, and potentially all-inclusive — could not have come
into existence except (i) through the action in men of
a desire of which (unlike the desire for pleasure) the object
is in its own nature common to all; and (2) through the
formation in men's minds of a conception of what this object
is, sufficiently full and clear to prevent its being regarded as
an object for any one set of men to the exclusion of another.
It was among the followers of Socrates, so far as we know,
that such a conception was for the first time formed and
expressed— for the first time, at any rate, in the history of
the traceable antecedents of modern Christendom. Inevit-
able prejudice, arising from the condition of society about
them, prevented them from apprehending the social corol-
laries of their own conception. But the conception of the
perfecting of man as the good for all, of a habit of will
directed to that work in some of its forms as the good for
each, had been definitely formed in certain minds, and only
z
338 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. HI
needed opportunity to bear its natural fruit. When through
the establishment of the ' Pax Romana ' round the basin of
the Mediterranean, or otherwise, the external conditions
had been fulfilled for the initiation of a society aiming at
universality ; when a person had appeared charging himself
with the work of establishing a kingdom of God among men,
announcing purity of heart as the sole condition of member-
ship of that kingdom, and able to inspire his followers with
a belief in the perpetuity of his spiritual presence and work
among them ; then the time came for the value of the philo-
sopher's work to appear.
They had provided men with a definite and, in principle,
true conception of what it is to be good — a conception in-
volving no conditions but such as it belongs to man as man,
without distinction of race or caste or intellectual gifts, to
fulfil. When the old barriers of nations and caste were
being broken down ; when a new society, all-embracing in
idea and aspiration, was forming itself on the basis of the
common vocation ' Be ye perfect as your Father in Heaven
is perfect,' there was need of conceptions, at once definite
and free from national or ceremonial limitations, as to the
modes of virtuous living in which that vocation was to be
fulfilled. Without them the universal society must have re-
mained an idea and aspiration, for there would have been
no intellectual medium through which its members could
communicate and co-operate with each other in furtherance
of the universal object. It was in consequence of Greek
philosophy, or rather of that general reflection upon morality
which Greek philosophy represented, that such conceptions
were forthcoming. By their means men could arrive at a
common understanding of the goodness which, as citizens
of the kingdom of God, it was to be their common object
to promote in themselves and others. The reciprocal claim
of all upon all to be helped in the effort after a perfect life
could thus be rendered into a language intelligible to all
who had assimilated the moral culture of the Graeco-Roman
world. For them conscious membership of a society founded
CH. v] THE MORAL IDEAL 339
on the acknowledgement of this claim became a definite
possibility. And as the possibility was realised, as conscious
membership of such a society became an accomplished
spiritual fact, men became aware of manifold relations, un-
thought of by the philosophers, in which the virtues of
courage, temperance and justice were to be exercised, and
from the recognition of which it resulted that, while the prin-
ciple of those virtues remained as the philosophers had con-
ceived it, the range of action understood to be implied in being
thus virtuous became (as we have seen) so much wider.
286. It will be well here to recall the main points to
which our enquiry in its later stages has been directed. Our
theory has been that the development of morality is founded
on the action in man of an idea of true or absolute good,
consisting in the full realisation of the capabilities of the
human soul. This idea, however, according to our view, 1
acts in man, to begin with, only as a demand unconscious
of the full nature, of its object. The demand is indeed
from the outset quite different from a desire for pleasure.
It is at its lowest a demand for some well-being which shall
be common to the individual desiring it with others ; and
only as such does it yield those institutions of the family,
the tribe, and the state, which further determine the morality
of the individual. The formation of more adequate con-
ceptions of the end to which the demand is directed we
have traced to two influences, separable for purposes of
abstract thought but not in fact : one, the natural develop-
ment, under favouring conditions, of the institutions, just
mentioned, to which the demand gives rise; the other,
reflection alike upon these institutions and upon those well-
reputed habits of action which have been formed in their
maintenance and as their effect. Under these influences
there has arisen, through a process of which we have en-
deavoured to trace the outline, on the one hand an ever-
widening conception of the range of persons between whom
the common good is common, on the other a conception of
z 3
340 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
I the nature of the common good itself, consistent with its
[being the object of a universal society co-extensive with
mankind. The good has come to be conceived with in-
creasing clearness, not as anything which one man or set of
men can gain or enjoy to the exclusion of others, but as a
spiritual activity in which all may partake, and in which all
imust partake, if it is to amount to a full realisation of the
jfaculties of the human soul. And the progress of thought
in individuals, by which the conception of the good has
been thus freed from material limitations, has gone along
with a progress in social unification which has made it
possible for men practically to conceive a claim of all upon
I all for freedom and support in the pursuit of a common end.
Thus the ideal of virtue which_our consciences acknowledge
has come to be the devotion of character and life, in >vhat-
eveT'channel the idiosyncrasy and circumstances oJLlbe
indivrdual may determine, to a perfecting of man, whii;h is
itselTconceived noFas an external end to W attfij"p'^ by.
goodnesiTTjut asconsisting in such a life of self-devoted
activity on the part of all persons. From the difficulty of
presenting to ourselves in any positive form what a society,
' perfected in this sense, would be, we may take refuge in
' describing the object of the devotion, which our consciences
demand, as the greatest happiness of the greatest number ;
and until we puzzle ourselves with analysis, such an account
>may be sufficient for practical purposes. But our theory
becomes false to the real demand of conscience, if it inter-
prets this happiness except as including and dependent upon
the unimpeded exercise by the greatest number of a will,
the same in principle with that which conscience calls upon
the individual to aim at in himself.
287. No sooner, however, has such a statement been
made in regard to the end of moral effort than one becomes
aware how liable it is to be understood in an abstract sense,
wholly inadequate to the meaning which it is intended to
convey. It seems to reduce the life of thoroughly realised
spiritual capacity, in which we must suppose all that is now
CH. v] THE MORAL IDEAL 341
inchoate in the way of art and knowledge, no less than of
moral efforts, to have reached completion, to a level with
that effort as we know it under those conditions of impeded
activity which alone (as it might seem) give a meaning to
such phrases as 'self-sacrifice' or a 'devoted will.' The
student of Aristotle will naturally recall his saying, aaxoKov-
fifdn Li/a <T)(o\a^aitev, Koi TroKe/ioviiev Iv etiiTjvrjv nyaiiev *, and will
object to us that, while professing to follow in principle
Aristotle's conception of virtue as directed to the attain-
ment of a good consisting in a realisation of the soul's
powers, we are forgetting Aristotle's pronounced judgment
that the highest form of this realisation, and with it com-
plete ' happiness,' was to be reached not in the exercise of
the ' practical virtues ' with their attendant pains and unrest,
but in the life of pure contemplation, which, whatever diffi-
culty there may be in forming any positive conception of it,
was certainly understood as excluding self-denial and all the
qualities which we naturally take to be characteristic of
moral goodness. Even those who may be disposed to think
that Aristotle's language about the blessedness of the con-
templative life expresses little more than a philosopher's
conceit ; that, if applied to the pursuit of science and philo-
sophy as we in fact painfully pursue them, it is quite untrue;
and that, in any attempt to translate it into an account of
some fruition of the Godhead higher than we can yet expe-
rience, we pass at once into a region of unreality — even
such persons may be ready to accept his view in its nega-
tive application. They may think that he makes out his
case unanswerably against the supposition that moral good-
ness in any intelligible sense can be carried on into, or be
a determining element in, the life in which ultimate good is
actually attained.
288. In meeting this objection it must be once more
admitted that our view of what the life would be, in which \
ultimate good was actually attained, can never be an adequate 1
' Le. 'We give up leisure in order to enjoy it, and we make war
for the sake of having peace." Eth. Nic. X. vii. 6.
342 MORAL ID^AL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
view. It consists of the idea that such a life must be possible,
' filled up as regards particulars, in some inadequate measure,
/ by reflection on the habits and activities, on the modes of
life and character, which through influence of that idea have
I been brought into being. If the idea, as it actuates us,
' carried with it a full consciousness of what its final realisation
I would be, the distinction between idea and realisation would
/ be at an end. But while for this reason it is impossible for
us to say what the perfecting of man, of which the idea
actuates the moral life, in its actual attainment might be,
1 we can discern certain conditions which, if it is to satisfy
I the idea, it must fulfil. It must be a perfecting of man —
\ not of any human faculty in abstraction, or of any imaginary
individuals in that detachment from social relations in which
they would not be men at all. We are therefore justified in
holding that it could not be attained in a life of mere
scientific and artistic activity, any more than in one of
' practical ' exertion from which those activities were absent ;
in holding further that the life in which it is attained must
I be a social life, in which all men freely and consciously co-
' operate, since otherwise the possibilities of their nature, as
agents who are ends to themselves, could not be realised in
^ it ; and, as a corollary of this, that it must be a life determined
by one harmonious will — a will of all which is the will of
each — such as we have previously called, in treating it as
the condition of individual virtue, a devoted will; i.e. a will
\having for its object the perfection which it alone can
-maintain.
When we speak of the formation of such a will in all men
as itself constituting that true end of moral effort, relation
' to which gives the virtues their value, we understand it, not
as determined merely by an abstract idea of law, but as im-
plying (what it must in fact imply) a whole world of beneficent
social activities, which it shall sustain and co-ordinate. These
activities, as they may become in a more perfect state of
mankind, we cannot present to ourselves ; but they would
not be the activities of a more perfect mankind, unless they
CH. v.] THE MORAL IDEAL 343
were the expression of a will which pursues them for their
own sake, or as its own fulfilment. Such a will therefore we
may rightly take to be in principle that perfect life, unknown
to us except in its principle, which is the end of morality ; '••
a like will being the condition of those virtues, known to us
not in principle merely but in some imperfect exercise, which
form the means to that end.
289. This explanation made, we return to our statement
that ' the ideal of virtue which our consciences acknowledge 1
has come to be the devotion of character and life to a i
perfecting of man, which is itself conceived as consisting 1
in a life of self-devoted activity on the part of all persons.'
This statement naturally suggests two further lines of objec-
tion and enquiry. If we are to accept it as a true account of
the ideal of virtue, what is to be said, it may be asked, of those
activities, those developed faculties, in the pursuit of know-
ledge and in the practice of art, which we undoubtedly value
and admire, and which the ancient philosophers for that
reason rightly reckoned virtues, but which would not com-
monly be thought to have anything to do with such devotion
of character and life to a perfecting of man as is here made
out to be at once the essence and the end of virtue, either
in the way of implying it on the part of the man of science
and the artist, or as tending to promote it in others ? That
they tend to general pleasure may perhaps be admitted, but
can it be seriously held that they contribute to a true good
consisting in self-devoted activity on the part of all persons ?
Must we not either be content to accept the account of true
good as consisting in that general pleasure to which the
practice of the moral virtues and the pursuit of science and
art may, at least with much plausibility, be alike considered
means ; or, if we will not accept this account of the end of
morality, must we not admit that the value of the moral
virtues on the one side, and that of intellectual excellence,
scientific or artistic, on the other, cannot be deemed relative
to one common good ?
290. To any one who has accepted the reasons given for
344 MORAL WEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill
rejecting the notion that pleasure is the true good, and who
at the same time recognises the necessity of conceiving some
ultimate unity of good, to which all true values are relative,
these questions present a serious difficulty. It shall be dealt
with in the sequel, and is noticed here in order to record
the writer's admission that it cannot be passed over '. But
for the present, considering the readiness with which most
people acquiesce in the distinction of moral from other
excellence, as if it were relative to an end of its own with
which science and art, as such, have nothing to do, it may
be advisable to give precedence to another order of objections
with which our doctrine is likely to be challenged.
Of what avail, it will be asked, is the theory of the good
and of goodness here stated for the settlement of any of the
questions which a moralist is expected to help us to settle ?
We want some available criterion of right and wrong in action.
We want a theory of Duty which, as appUed to the circum-
stances of life, can be construed into particular duties, so
that we may be able to judge how far our own actions and
lives (to say nothing of those of others) are what they should
' [The question is not discussed in the Prolegomena to Ethics, and
from a mark at this point in the Author's manuscript it is almost
certain that he had abandoned the idea of dealing with it in the present
volume. It has however been thought best to print the section in its
entirety. The reader will probably gather from Book III a general
idea of the way in which the difficulty would have been met, especially
if he remembers that the end has been throughout defined as the
realisation of the possibilities of human nature, and that devotion to
such objects as the well-being of a family, the sanitation of a town, or
the composition of a book, has been described as an unconscious pur-
suit of this end. In other words, the pursuit of such objects for their
own sakes is considered to have a latent reference to the whole of
/ which they are parts, a reference which would become conscious if
the whole and the parts were ever opposed to each other ; and this
I point of view would no doubt have been worked out with regard to
. the pursuit of art and science as ends in themselves (cf. § 370 sub fin.).
The question becomes more complicated when the person who devotes
himself to art or science is supposed to have formed a philosophical
conception of the ultimate end ; and on this question the concluding
pages of the volume should be consulted.]
CH.vJ THE MORAL IDEAL 345
be, and may have some general guide to the line of conduct
we should adopt in circumstances where use and wont will
either not guide us at all, or will lead us astray. But the
theory advanced above, construed in the natural way, would
seem too severe to admit of practical use, for it would offer
nothing but unrealisable counsels of perfection ; while, con-
strued in another way, it would seem to allow of our treating
any and every action as having its measure of good. If it
is meant that, in order to be morally good — in order to satisfy
a duly exacting conscience — an action must have for its
motive a desire consciously directed to human perfection,
we shall have a standard of goodness which might indeed
serve the purpose, so far as we acknowledged it, of keeping
us in perpetual self-abasement ; but, if we were not to act
till we acted from such a motive, should we ever act at all ?
If, on the other hand, our theory of the good practically
means no more than that the morality of actions represents
the operation in human society of an impulse after self-
realisation on the part of some impersonal spirit of mankind,
it will yield no criterion of the good and bad in action ; for
we must hold every distinctively human action, good and bad
alike, to be characterised by the results of such operation.
Even if our theory be correct in regard to the spiritual impulse,
other than desire for pleasure, implied in the formation of
morality and the susceptibility to moral ideals, is it not after
all by a calculation of pleasure-giving consequences that we
can alone decide whether an action which has been done
should or should not have been done, or which of the
courses of action open to us under any given complication
of circumstances should or should not be adopted ?
These questions will be considered in our next Book.
BOOK IV
THE APPLICATION OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY
TO THE GUIDANCE OF CONDUCT
CHAPTER I
THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF THE MORAL IDEAL
291. In considering whether our theory of the good and
of goodness can be of use in helping us to decide what ought
to be done and whether we are doing it, it is important to
bear in mind the two senses — the fuller and the more re-
stricted— in which the question, What ought to be done?
may be asked. It may either mean— and this is the narrower
sense in which the question may be asked — What ought an
action to be as determined in its nature by its effects ? or it
may be asked with the fuller meaning, What ought the action
to be with reference to the state of mind and character which
it represents? in which case the simple ri Sii wpdrTeiv ;
becomes equivalent to n&s tx<t>v nparrei 6 to hiov npaTTuti) ; The
former is the sense in which the question is asked, when it
is not one of a self-examining conscience, but of perplexity
between different directions in which duty seems to call.
The latter is the sense in which a man asks it when he is
comparing his practice with his ideal. We reckon the latter
sense the fuller, because a man cannot properly decide
whether, in respect of character and motives, he is acting as
he ought, without considering the effects of the course of
action which he is pursuing, as compared with the effects of
other courses of action which it is open to him to pursue ' ;
while he can compare the value of one set of effects with
another without considering the nature of the motives which
might prompt him to the adoption of the several courses of
' [This statement should be taken in connection with § 304 and foil.]
MOTIVE AND CONSEQUENCES 347
action leading to the several effects. Thus, whereas the
question in the latter sense includes the question as asked
in the former sense, the question can be dealt with in the
former sense without raising it in the latter.
292. It is clear, however, that in whichever of these dis-
tinguishable senses we ask the question. What ought to be
done ? the answ^er to it must be regulated by one and the
same conception of the good. If we hold, according to the
explanation previously given, that the one unconditional good
is the good will, this must be the end by reference to which
we estimate the effects of an action. The circumstances in
which the question is raised, whether such or such an action
ought to be done, may be of a kind, as we shall see presently,
which prevent any reference to the character of an agent, and
shut us up in our moral judgment of the act to a considera-
tion of its effects ; but the effects which we look to, accord-
ing to our theory, must still be effects bearing on that
perfection of human character which we take to be the good.
In like manner the consistent Utilitarian will answer the
question of ' ought or ought not ' in both the distinguished
senses upon one and the same principle. He decides what
ought to be done under any given circumstances by con-
sidering what will be the effects, in the way of producing
pleasure or pain, of the several courses of action possible
under the circumstances ; and for the same reasons upon
which he decides what the action, as measured by its effects,
should be, he will hold that it should be done — will be of
more value, according to the same standard, if done — in
a state of mind which itself involves pleasure ; cheerfully and
' disinterestedly,' not under any kind of constraint. But it
will only be indirectly, according to him, that the question
of the motive — of the ultimate object which the man sets
before himself in doing the act — will come into account-
The act will not depend for its goodness or moral value, for
being such an act as ought to be done, upon this motive or
object. For this it depends simply, according to the Utili-
tarian view, upon its pleasure-giving effects. The question
348 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
whether the motive from which the act proceeds is good or
bad, a motive which a man ought or ought not to have, is
a separate question, and one to which the answer depends
on that given to the question whether the actions to which
such a motive ordinarily incites are or are not actions which,
on the ground of their pleasure-giving effects, ought to be
done. The motives which we ought to have, the dispositions
which we ought to cultivate (if indeed the term 'ought,'
according to the Utilitarian view, can be applied in this con-
nection at all), will be so because they lead to actions pro-
ductive of preponderating pleasure '.
293. Upon the view of the moral end or good adopt.ed
in this treatise, the question of motive and the question of
effects hold quite a different relative position to that which
they hold in the Utilitarian systerii. If the good is a per-
fection of mankind, of which the vital bond must be a will
on the part of all men, having some mode of that perfection
for its object, it will only be in relation to a state of will,
either as expressing it or as tending to promote it, or as
doing both, that an action can have moral value at all. The
actions which ought to be done, in the fullest sense of the
word, are actions expressive of a good will, in the sense that
they represent a character of which the dominant interest
is in conduct contributory to the perfection of mankind^ in
doing that which so contributes for the sake of doing it.
We cannot say with complete truth of any action which has
' Cf. Mill's Utilitarianism, p. 26, note. ' The morality of the action
depends entirely upon the intention — that is, upon what the agent aii7/s
to do' (as distinct from the end which he seelcs in doing it). ' But the
motiv6, that is, the feeling which makes him will so to do, when it
makes l>o diiference in the act, makes none in the morality : though it
makes a great difference in our moral estimation of the agent, especially
if it indicates a good or a bad habitual disposition — a bent of character
from which useful or from which hurtful actions are likely to arise."
' Useful ' of course here means pleasure-giving. ' When it makes no
difference in the act ' means, when it makes no difference in the act as
measured by its outward effects. That the motive should make no
difference to an act, in its true or full nature, we should pronounce,
according to the view stated in the text, to be an impossibility.
CH.l] MOTIVE AND CONSEQUENCES 349
been done, that it has been what it ought to have been, un-
less it represents such a character, or of any action contem-
plated as possible, that it will be what it ought to be, except
on supposition that it will fulfil the same condition.
But it is clear that even among past actions it is only of
his ownj if of them, that a man has really the means of judg-
ing whether they represent such a character. Of prospective
actions for which we are not personally and immediately
responsible, we could never say that they are such as ought
to be done, if we considered them to depend for being so on
the disposition of the agent ; since we cannot foresee what
the disposition with which any agent will do them will be.
When we say that restraints ought to be put upon the liquor-
traffic, or that a mistress ought to look carefully after her
servants, or that our neighbour ought to give his children
a better education, we are not making any reference in
thought to any motive or disposition from which we suppose
that the. obligatory act will proceed. In such cases, as in all
where we apply the predicates ' ought ' and ' ought not ' other-
wise than in reflection upon our own acts, or in some inter-
pretation of the acts of others founded on an ascription to
them of motives which we think their acts evidence, we are
not contemplating the acts in their full nature. The full
nature, for instance, of a father's act in providing for the
education of his children depends on the character or state
of will which it represents; and what this is in any particular
case no one can tell. But the action has a nature, though
not its whole nature, in respect of its effect upon the children,
and through them upon others; and we can abstract this
nature from its nature in relation to the will of the father,
without error resulting in our judgment as to the former,
just as we can judge correctly of the mechanical relations
of a muscular effort without taking account of the organic
processes on which the effort really depends.
It is an abstraction of this kind that we have to make in
all cases where we judge, without reference to ourselves,
that a certain sort of action, not yet dpnej is one. that .ought
350 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
to be done ; and it might be well if we could make up our
minds that we are not warranted in going further when we
judge the actions of others. Histories, no doubt, would be
much shortened, and would be found much duller, if specu-
lations about the motives (as distinct from the intentions) of
the chief historical agents were omitted ; nor shall we soon
cease to criticise the actions of contemporaries on the strength
of inferences from act to motive. But in all this we are on
very uncertain ground. It is clearly quite right in judging
either of historical or contemporary actions to take account,
so far as possible, of all the circumstances — to appreciate the
bearings of any act as presented to those who were or are
concerned in doing it, to consider what the effects of it, as
probably contemplated by them, were or are. But this is
a different thing from trying to ascertain the state of character
on the part of the agents which the actions represent, and in
ignorance of which the full moral nature of the acts is not
known. It is wiser not to make guesses where we can do
no more than guess, and to confine ourselves, where no quei-
tion of self-condemnation or self-approval is involved, to measur-
ing the value of actions by their effects without reference to
the character of the agents : as we must do (subject to a re-
servation to be stated below) where the question is whether
an action, not yet done, ought to be done or not.
294. After this statement we shall naturally be called on
to explain in what cases and in what way, according to our
theory, a man should endeavour, when it is an action which
he has himself done, or thinks of doing, that is in question,
to consider it in what we have called its full moral nature,
i.e, with reference not merely to effects which it has had
or is likely to have, but to the state of mind on the part of
the agent which it expresses or would express. Before
doing so, however, let us make sure that the reader is under
no misapprehension as to the points at issue with the
Utilitarians, with whom we agree in holding that ordinary
judgments upon the moral value of actions must be founded
on consideration of their effects alone. To the Utilitarian
CH. l] MOTIVE AND CONSEQUENCES 351
the virtuous character is good simply as a means to an end
quite diflferent from itself, namely a maximum of possible
pleasure. An action is good, or has moral value, or is one
that ought to be done, upon the same ground. If two
actions, done by different men, are alike in their production
of pleasure, they are alike in moral value, though the doer
of one is of virtuous character and the doer of the other
is not so. In our view the virtuous character is good, not
as a means to a ' summum bonum ' other than itself, but as
in principle identical with the ' summum bonum ' ; and ac-
cordingly, if two actions could be alike in their moral effects
(as they very well may be in production of pleasure) which
represent, the one a more virtuous, the other a less virtuous
character, they would still be quite different in moral value.
The one would be more, the other less, of a good, according
to the kind of character which they severally represent.
But it is only an action done by himself that a man has
the means of estimating in relation to the character repre-
sented by it. Actions done by others, if similar outwardly
or in effect, can only be referred to similar states of character,
though the states which they represent may in fact be most
different; and in regard to actions simply contemplated
as possible the question of the character represented by
them cannot be raised at all. When from the nature of the
case, however, a consideration of effects can alone enter
into the moral valuation of an act, the effects to be con-
sidered, according to our view, will be different from those
of which the Utilitarian, according to his principles, would
take account. They will be effects, not in the way of
producing pleasure, but in the way of contributing to that
perfection of mankind, of which the essence is a good will
on the part of all persons. These are the effects which,
in our view, an action must in fact tend to produce, if it
is one that ougAt to be done, according to the most limited
sense of that phrase ; just as these are the effects for tfie
sake of which it must be done, if it is done as it ought
to be done.
352 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MODERN THEORY [bk. IV
295. For an omniscient being, indeed, the distinction^
unavoidable for us — between the judgment that an action
ought to be done, and the judgment that an action is done
as it ought to be done, would not exist. It is occasioned
by a separation in the moral judgment of act from motive,
only possible for an imperfect intelligence. An omniscient
being could not contemplate a future action as merely pos-
sible, or apart from the motive which must really cause it
when it comes to be done, any more than it could fail to
know the motive of every act that has been done. Knowing
the state of will from which every future act will proceed,
as well as that from which every past act has proceeded,
it would not regard any act as being what it should be,
unless the character expressed by it were what it should be.
It would trace the effect of any fault on the part of the
character in the actual consequences of the action. For
it is only to our limited vision that there can seem to be
such a thing as good effects from an action that is bad in
respect of the will which it represents, and that in conse-
quence the question becomes possible, whether the morality
of an action is determined by its motive or by its con-
sequences. There is no real reason to doubt that the good
or evil in the motive of an action is exactly measured by
the good or evil in its consequences, as rightly estimated —
estimated, that is, in their bearing on the production of
a good will or the perfecting of mankind. The contrary
only appears to be the case on account of the limited view
we take both of action and consequences. We notice, for
instance, that selfish motives lead an able man to head a-
movement of political reform which has beneficent conse-
quences. Here, we say, is an action bad in itself, accord-
ing to the morality of the ' good will,' but which has good
effects; is it to be judged according to its motive, or ac-
cording to its effects ? But, in fact, if we look a little more
closely, we shall find that the selfish political leader was
himself much more of an instrument than of an originating
cause, and that his action was but a trifling element in the
CH. l] MOTIVE AND CONSEQUENCES 353
sum or series of actions which yielded the political move-
ment. The good in the effect of the movement will really '
correspond to the degree of good will which has been ex-
erted in bringing it about ; and the effects of any selfish-
ness in its promoters will appear in some limitation to the
good which it brings to society.
It is seldom indeed that the most conspicuous actors on
the world's stage are known to us enough from the inside,
or that the movements in which they take part can be con-
templated with sufficient completeness, to enable us very
certainly to verify this assurance in regard to them. But
the more we learn of such a person, for instance, as Napo-
leon, and of the work which seemed to be his, the more
clearly does it appear how what was evil in it arose out of
his personal selfishness and that of his contemporaries,
while what was good in it was due to higher and purer
influences of which he and they were but the medium.
And within the more limited range of affairs which each
of us can observe for himself a like lesson is being con-
stantly learnt. If the ' best motives ' seem sometimes to ^
lead to actions which are mischievous in results, it is be-
cause these 'best motives' have not been good enough.,
If there has been no other taint of selfishness about them, ,
yet they have been acted on inconsiderately ; which means
that the agent has been too selfish to take the trouble duly
to think of what his action brings with it to others. It is
only, in short, the unavoidably abstract nature of our judg-
ments upon conduct that leads to distinction between good
in motive and good in effect. We infer a motive from the
action of another ; but, if the inference be correct so far as
it goes, we still do not know the motive in its full reality, —
in its. relation, so to speak, to the universe of a character,
and to the influences which have made and are making that
character. The effects of the action, again, we only con-
template in a like fragmentary way. With the whole spir-
itual history of the action before us on the one side, with
the whole sum and series of its effects before us on the
A a
354 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
other, we should presumably see that just so far as a good
will, i.e. a will determined by interest in objects contribu-
tory to human perfection, has had more or less to do with
bringing the action about, there is more or less good, i.e.
more or less contribution to human perfection, in its
effects.
296. Granting, then, that the moral value of an action
really depends on the motives or character which it repre-
sents, the question remains whether for us the consideration
of motives can be of any avail in deciding whether an action
ought to be done or to have been done. It must be ad-
mitted at once that, in judging of another's action, we have
not enough insight into motive (as distinct from intention)
to be warranted in founding our moral estimate on anything
but the effects of the action. At the same time we are
bound to remember that an estimate so founded is neces-
sarily imperfect, and to be cautious in our personal criticism
accordingly. Only if the agent himself describes his mo-
tives, as interesting persons are apt to do, are we warranted
in judging them, and then only as described by him. Again,
when the question is whether an action ought to be done,
which we are not ourselves responsible for doing or pre-
venting, a consideration of motives can plainly have no
bearing on it. There remain the cases (r) of reflection
on past actions of our own, (2) of consideration whether an
act should be presently done, which it rests with ourselves
to do or not to do. In both these cases the question of the
character or state of will which an action represents may
be raised with a possibility of being answered. Given an
ideal of virtue, such as has been delineated above, a man
may ask himself. Was I, in doing so and so, acting as a
good' man should, with a pure heart, with a will set on the
objects on which it should be set? — or again^ Shall I, in
doing so and so, be acting as a good man should, goodness
being understood in the same sense ? The question may be
reasonably asked, and there is nothing in the nature of the
case to prevent a true answer being given to it. It remains
CH. l] CONSCIENTIOUSNESS 355
to be considered, however, whether it can be raised with
advantage ; whether our ideal of virtue can in this way be
practically applied with the result of giving men either truer
views of what in particular they ought to do, or a better
disposition to do it.
297. The habit in a man of raising such questions about
himself as those just indicated, is what we have mainly in
view when we call him conscientious. Now it must certainly
be admitted that there have been men, great in service to
their kind, to whom we should not naturally apply this
epithet ; and again that although, in most cases where a man
is complained of as 'over-conscientious,' the complaint
merely indicates his superiority to the level of moral practice
about him, it may sometimes indicate a real fault. There is
a kind of devotion to great objects or to public service,
which seems to leave a man no leisure and to afford no
occasion for the question about himself, whether he has
been as good as he should have been, whether a better man
would not have acted otherwise than he has done. And
again there is a sense in which to be always fingering one's
motives is a sign rather of an unwholesome preoccupation
with self than of the eagerness in disinterested service which
helps forward mankind. A man's approach to the ideal of
virtue is by no means to be measured by the clearness or
constancy of his reflection upon the ideal. A prevalent
interest in some work which tends to make men what they
should be may be found in those who seldom entertain the
question whether they are themselves what they should be,
and who in those regions of their life which lie off the line
of the prevailing interest — perhaps also in their choice of
means by which to give effect to that interest — are the worse
for not entertaining it. With all their sins of omission and
commission such men may be nearer the ideal of virtue than
others, who pride themselves on conformity to a standard
of virtue (which cannot be the highest, or they would not
credit themselves with conforming to it), and who so hug
A a 2
356 PRACTICAL VALVE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
their reputation with themselves for acting conscientiously
that in difficult situations they will not act at all.
298. This admission made, it remains true that the com-
parison of our own practice, as we know it on the inner side
in relation to the motives and character which it expresses,
with an ideal of virtue, is the spring from which morality
perpetually renews its life. It is thus that we ' lift up our
hearts, and lift them up unto the Lord.' It is thus alone,
however insufficient, however ' dimly charactered and slight,'
the ideal, that the initiative is given in the individual — and
it can be given nowhere else — to any movement which
really contributes to the bettering of man. It is thus that
he is roused from acquiescence in the standard of mere
respectability. No one, indeed, who recognises in their full
extent the results of disinterested spiritual effort on the part
of a forgotten multitude, which the respectability of any
civilised age embodies, or who asks himself what any of us
would be but for a sense of what respectability requires, will
be disposed to depreciate its value. But the standard of
respectability by which any age or country is influenced
could never have been attained, if the temper which ac-
quiesces in it had been universal — if no one had been lifted
above that acquiescence — in the past. It has been reached
through the action of men who, each in his time and turn,
have refused to accept the way of living which they found
about them, and to which, upon the principle of seeking the
greater pleasure and avoiding the greater pain, they would
naturally have conformed. The conception of a better way
of living may have been on a larger or a smaller scale. It
may have related to some general reformation of society, or
to the change of some particular practice in which the pro-
testing individual had been concerned. But if it has taken
effect in any actual elevation of morality, it is because certain
men have brought it home to themselves in a contrast be-
tween what they should be and what they are, which has
awakened the sense of a personal responsibility for improve-
ment.
CH. l] CONSCIENTIOUSNESS 357
In so doing they may not have raised the question of
personal goodness, in the form in which it presents itself to
the self-examining conscience of one who lives among a
highly moralised society and conforms as a matter of course
to its standards. They may not have asked themselves,
Have we, in doing what was expected of us, been doing it
from the right rriotives? In that form the question pre-
supposes the establishment of a definite standard of con-
ventional morality. In the days when such morality was
still in making, and in the minds of the forgotten enthusiasts
to whom we owe it, this would scarcely be the way in which
the contrast between an ideal of virtue and current practice
would present itself. Under such conditions it would pre-
sent itself less as a challenge to purify the heart than as
a call to new courses of overt action, the relation of which
to motives and character it would not occur to any one to
consider. But in principle it is the same operation in the
individual of an idea of a perfect life, with which his own is
contrasted, whether it take the form of a consciousness of
personal responsibility for putting an end to some practice
which, to a mind awakening to the claims of the human
soul, seems unjust or unworthy, or the form of self-interro-
gation as to the purity of the heart from which a walk and
conduct, outwardly correct, proceeds.
299. It may be objected, however, that in thus identifying
the motive power at work in the practical reformer of
morality with that which sets the introspective conscience
upon the enquiry whether the heart is as pure as it should
be, we are obscuring the real question as to the practical
value of the latter. No one doubts that a man who improves
the current morality of his time must be something of an
Idealist. He must have an idea, which moves him to seek
its realisation, of a better order of life than he finds about
him. That idea cannot represent any experienced reality.
If it did, the reformer's labour would be superfluous ; the
order of life which he seeks to bring about would be already
in existence. It is an idea to which nothing real as yet
358 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk.'IV
corresponds, but which, as actuating the reformer, tends to
bring into being a reality corresponding to itself. It is in
this sense that the reformer must be an Idealist. But the
idea which he seeks to realise is an idea of definite institu-
tions and arrangements of life, of courses of action, each
producing their outward sensible effects. What real identity
is there between the influence of such an idea — an ideal of
virtue, if we like to call it so — producing a visible alteration
in man's life, and that of an ideal which sets a man upon
asking, not what there is which he ought to do and is not
doing, but whether, in that which he has been doing and
will (as he ought) continue to do, his heart has been suffi-
ciently pure ?
The identity will appear, when we reflect that it is not
a ' mere idea ' of a better order of life that ever set any one
upon a work of disinterested moral reform, in that sense of
the term in which one of us might have 'an idea' of the
Lord Mayor's show, or of a debate in Parliament, without
having been present at them. The idea which moves the
reformer is one that he feels a personal responsibility for
realising. This feeling of personal responsibility for its
execution is part and parcel of the practical idea itself, of
I the form of consciousness which we so describe. It is that
which distinguishes it as a practical idea. The reformer
cannot bear to think of himself except as giving effect, so
far as may be, to his project of reform ; and thus, instead
of merely contemplating a possible work, he does it. He
presents himself to himself on the one hand as achieving, so
far as in him lies, the contemplated work, on the other hand
as neglecting it for some less worthy object ; and he turns
with contempt and aversion from the latter presentation.
Now it is because, to the real reformer, the thought of some-
thing which should be done is thus always at the same time
the thought of something which he should be and seeks to
be, but would not be if he did not do the work, that there is
a real unity between the spiritual principle which animates
him, and that which appears in the self-questioning of the
CH. l] CONSCIENTIOUSNESS 359
man who, without charging himself with the neglect of any
outward duty, without contemplating any particular good work
which he might do but has not done, still asks himself whether
he has been what he should be in doing what he has done.
300. But, granted the unity of the spiritual principle at
work in the two supposed cases, is there any real unity in
the effects which it produces in the person of the moral
reformer and in the person of the self-questioning ' saint ' ?
In the one case the effect is the recognition and fulfilment
of certain specific duties, previously not recognised or not
fulfilled, by the moral reformer and those whom he in-
fluences. He and they come to deal differently with their
fellow-men. But in the other case, if we enquire what
specific performance follows from the self-questioning as to
purity of heart, we find it difficult to answer. Among the
respectable classes of a well-regulated society there is little
in outward walk and conduct to distinguish the merely
respectable from the most anxiously conscientious. As
a rule, it will only be to a man already pretty thoroughly
moralised by the best social influences that it will occur to
reproach himself with having unworthy motives even in
irreproachable conduct ; and, as a rule, when such a man
comes thus to reproach himself in presence of some ideal
of a perfect Will, he will already have been fulfiUing, under
the feeling that it is expected of him, all the particular duties
which the consciousness of such an ideal might otherwise
challenge him to fulfil. Unless he has leisure for philan-
thropy, or a gift of utterance, there will be little in outward
act to distinguish his converted state — if we may so describe
the state in which he learns to contrast his personal un-
worthiness with an ideal of holiness — from that of moral
self-complacency, in which he may have previously been
living, and which is the state of most of the dutiful citizens
about him.
301. If we could watch him closely enough, indeed, even
in outward conduct there would appear to be a difference.
Doing the work expected of him ' not with eye-seuvice, as
360 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
a man-pleaser, but in singleness of heart, as unto the Lord,'
he will rise to a higher standard of doing it. Into the
duties which he is expected to fulfil he will put much more
meaning than is put by those who claim their fulfilment,
and will always be on the look-out for duties which no one
would think the worse of him for not recognising. But in
so doing, he probably will not seem to himself to be acting
according to a higher standard than those about him. And
in fact, although in a certain sense he transcends the ' law
of opinion,' of social expectation, he only does so by inter-
preting it according to its higher spirit. That law, being,
as we have seen, the result of the past action in human con-
sciousness of an ideal of conduct, will yield different rules
according as it is or is not interpreted by a consciousness
under the same influence. It speaks with many voices
according as men have ears to hear, and the spirit of the
conscientious man shows itself in catching the purest of
them. . He is like a judge who is perpetually making new
law in ostensibly interpreting the old. He extracts the
higher meaning out of the recognised social code, giving'
reality to some requirements which it has hitherto only
contained potentially. He feels the necessity of rules of
conduct which, though they necessarily arise out of that
effort to make human life perfect which has brought con-
ventional morality into existence, are not yet a recognised
part of that morality, and thus have no authority with those
whose highest motive is a sense of what is expected of them.
302. This is true ; but it is not merely on this account —
not merely on account of certain effects in outward conduct
which, upon sufificient scrutiny, it might be found to yield —
that we claim for the temper of genuine self-abasement in
presence of an ideal of holiness an intrinsic value, the same
in kind with that which all would ascribe to a zeal for moral
reform. We claim such a value for it — a value independent
of any that it might possess as a means to a good other
than itself — on the ground that it is a component influence
in the perfect human life; on the ground that, whatever
CH. l] CONSCIENTIOUSNESS 361
the universe of activities in which that life displays itself
may prove to be, the self-abasing, which is also the aspiring
or God-seeking, spirit, must always be their source and
spring. The character exhibited by the moral reformer has
a like value, in so far as it is not merely a means -to the
perfect life, but a phase of the same spiritual principle as
must govern that life. But whereas we cannot but suppose
that, if the perfect life of mankind were attained, this
spiritual principle must have passed out of the phase in
which it can appear as a reforming zeal — for in that event
there could no longer be wrongs to redress, or indulged
vices to eradicate — on the other hand we cannot suppose
that, while human life remains human life, it can even in its
most perfect form be superior to the call for self-abasement
before an ideal of holiness.
There is no contradiction in the supposition of a human
life purged of vices and with no wrongs left to set right.
It is indeed merely the supposition of human life with all
its capacities realised. In such a life the question of the
reformer. What ought to be done in the way of overt action
that is not being done? would no longer be significant.
But so long as it is the life of men, t. e. of beings who are
born and grow and die ; in whom an animal nature is the
vehicle through which the divine self-realising spirit works ;
in whom virtue is not born ready-made but has to be formed
(however unfailing the process may come to be) through
habit and education in conflict with opposing tendencies;
so long the contrast must remain for the human soul
between itself and the infinite spirit, of whom it must be
conscious, as present to itself but other than itself, or it
would not be the human soul. The more complete the
realisation of its capacities, the clearer will be its apprehen-
sion at once of its own infinity in respect of its conscious-
ness of there being an infinite spirit— a consciousness which
only a self-communication of that spirit could convey — and
of its finiteness as an outcome of natural conditions; a
finiteness in consequence of which the infinite spirit is for
362 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
ever something beyond it, still longed for, never reached.
Towards an infinite spirit, to whom he is thus related, the
attitude of man at his highest and completest could still be
only that which we have described as self-abasement before
an ide"hl of holiness; not the attitude of knowledge, for
knowledge is of matters of fact or relations, and the infinite
spirit is neither fact nor relation ; not the attitude of full and
conscious union, for that the limitation of human nature
prevents ; but the same attitude of awe and aspiration which
belongs to all the upward stages of the moral life. He
must think of the infinite spirit as better than the best that
he can himself attain to, but (just for that reason) as having
an assential community with his own best. And, as his own
best rests upon a self-devoted will, so it must be as a will,
good not under the limitations of opposing tendencies but in
some more excellent, though not by us positively conceiv-
able, way, that he will set before himself the infinite spirit.
303. The spiritual act, then, which in different aspects
may be described either as self-abasement or self-exaltation —
the act in which the heart is lifted up to God, in which the
whole inner man goes forth after an ideal of personal holi-
ness— this act, while it is in principle one with the whole
course of man's moral endeavour, may be deemed in
a certain sense its most final form, because, in that rest
from the labour of baffled and disappointed endeavour
which a perfectly ordered society might be supposed to
bring, it would still not be superseded. Its value is an
intrinsic value, not derived from any result beyond itself to
which it contributes. In this respect, indeed, it does not
differ from any other expression of the good will. If it differs
apparently from the more obviously practical expressions
of such a will, the reason is that these, while sharing its
intrinsic value, have also a further value, as means, which it
does not seem to possess. They issue in sensible ameliora-
tions of human society. But these very ameliorations are
relative to that intrinsic good, the perfection of the human
soul, of which the heart at once self-abased and aspiring is
CH. l] CONSCIENTIOUSNESS 363
itself a lasting mode. Whether such a heart, in this person
or that, itself issues in outward 'transient' action of a
noticeably beneficent kind, will depend mainly on the social
surroundings, and on the intellectual and other qualifica-
tions of the particular person. If these in any case are
such as to call for and to favour a large amount of useful
social activity, we are apt under the impression of the out-
ward elfect to overlook the spiritual principle which yields it,
and which may be the same in another person otherwise
circumstanced and gifted, by whom no such apparent effect is
produced. We praise the successful reformer, and forget that
he is but what the man of unnoticed conscientious goodness
might be in another situation and with other opportunities.
If the end by reference to which moral values are to be
judged were anything but the perfect life itself, as resting
on a devoted will, it would be right to depreciate the
obscure saint by the side of the man to whose work we
can point in the redress of wrongs and the purging of social
vices. But if the supreme value for man is what we take it
to be — man himself in his perfection — then it is idle to
contrast the more observably practical type of goodness
with the more self-questioning or consciously God-seeking
type. The value of each is intrinsic and identical ; for
each rests on a heart or character or will which, however
differently it may come to be exhibited as human capacities
come to be more fulfilled, must still be that of the perfect
man. The distinction between them, as looked at from
the point of view from which moral values are properly
estimated, is mainly accidental. It is a distinction of the
circumstances under which the same principle of action is
exercised. Under certain conditions of society, of individual
temperament and ability, it takes the one form, under other
conditions the other. In neither form is it barren Of effects ;
but in one form its effects are more overt and ' transient,'
in the other more impalpable and 'immanent.' But the
one order of effects no less than the other has its value as
a means to that perfect life, to which the obscure saint and
364 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
the true social reformer alike are not merely related as
a means, but which each in his own person, under whatever
limitations, represents.
304. From these considerations we return to the enquiry
out of which they have arisen. Having distinguished the
question, What ought to be done ? — a question to be
answered in detail by examination of the probable effects of
contemplated action — from the question, What should I be?
— a question of motives and character — we pointed out that
the latter question might properly be raised by a man with
reference to his own actions, past or prospective. In regard
to others he cannot fully know what the motives and char-
acter represented by any particular action have been or will
be, and in the absence of such knowledge he certainly can-
not be blamable for declining to guess. But as to himself
any one may ask, Was I what I should have been in doing
so and so? or, Shall I in doing so and so be what I should
be ? He may ask such a question reasonably, because it
does not depend on the amount of his information, or on
his skill in analysis, but on his honesty with himself, whether
the answer shall be virtually a true one. But will he for
raising such questions, and raising them with such an ideal
of virtue before him as has been above indicated, be any
the wiser as to what he ought to do, or any the more
disposed to do it?
305. Now it is obvious that, though he put such questions
to himself with all possible earnestness, he will not for doing
so, directly at any rate, be the better judge of what he should
do, so far as the judgment depends on correct information
or inference as to matters of facts, or on a correct analysis
of circumstances. But a man's doubts as to his own con-
duct may be of a kind which such information and analysis
are principally needed to resolve. He may be asking him-
self such questions as these : Was I right in relieving that
beggar yesterday ? Was I right in making the declaration
required on taking orders ? Was I right in voting against
the Coercion Act last session? And he may be asking
CH. l] CONSCIENTIOUSNESS 365
these questions about himself in the same sense in which he
might ask them about the actions of any one else, or in
which they might be discussed by a debating society, with-
out any reference to the rnotives or character represented
by the acts in question. The supposition that any one
should ask such questions about his own conduct solely in
this sense, is no doubt an extreme one. He could not
really detach himself from the consideration of the state of
mind, better or worse, which led him to act as he did. In
relieving the beggar was he not merely compounding with
his conscience for his self-indulgence in shirking the trouble
which a more judicious exercise of benevolence would have
cost him ; or merely giving himself the pleasure of momen.
tarily pleasing another, or of being applauded for generosity,
at the cost of encouraging a mischievous practice? In
making the declaration referred to, was his motive a pure
desire to do good and teach the truth, or was he affected by
any desire to lead a comfortable life, combining a maximum
of reputation for usefulness with a minimum of wear and
tear? In voting against the Coercion Act was he at all
influenced by the wish to please an important fraction of his
constituents, or by a pique against ministers ? It is scarcely
possible that any one, at all honest with himself, should
consider his own conduct in the cases supposed without
testing it by some such questions of motive as these.
But when the fullest and most honest consideration has
been given them, they do not supersede the questions of
fact and circumstance which the supposed cases necessarily
involve. The man could not measure the value of his con-
duct in almsgiving, in taking orders, in voting against
Coercion, without taking account of the effect of almsgiving
in general and in the particular case ; of the circumstances
on which the usefulness of the Church, and the relative
truth of the declarations required by it, depend ; of those
conditions of social life in general, and in Ireland specially,
which make Coercion a necessity or a political evil. For
though he may do what is good in result without being
366 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
good, he cannot have been good unless he has done what is
good in result. The question whether he has done what he
ought in any particular case may be answered in the
affirmative without its following that he has been what he
ought to be in doing it ; but unless it can be so answered
he may not assume that he has been what he ought to be.
And in order to answer it in such cases as we have been
supposing, with due reference to circumstances and effects,
that sort of knowledge and penetration is required which
the most anxious self-interrogation, the most genuine self-
abasement, will not directly supply.
306. But, it will be objected, this admission is incon-
sistent with the statement just now made, that a true answer
to the question, Was I what I should have been in doing so
and so ? depends not on the amount of a man's information,
but on his honesty with himself. It now appears that
a man cannot have been what he should have been in doing
any action, unless the action was of a kind to yield good
results, and that the correctness of a man's judgment in
certain cases on this latter point depends not on his honesty
with himself, but on his knowledge and powers of analysis.
How are the two statements to be reconciled ? An explana-
tion of this point will bring out the true function and value
of the self-questioning conscience.
If the function of the conscience in challenging me with
the question. Was I what I should have been in doing this
or that ? were to arrive at a precise estimate of the worth of
my conduct in the particular case, the consideration of the
effects of the action could be as little dispensed with as that
of its motives. To make my conduct perfectly good, it
would be necessary that the effects of the act should be
purely for good, according to the true standard of good,
as well as that my interest in doing it should be purely
an interest in that good. It is obvious, however, that
the exact measure in which my conduct has fallen short
of this unattainable perfection, till we can see all moral
effects in their causes, cannot be speculatively ascertained.;
CH. l] CONSCIENTIOUSNESS 367
nor is it of practical importance to attempt its ascertainment.
What is of importance is that I should keep alive that kind
of sense of shortcoming in my motives and character, which
is the condition of aspiration and progress towards higher
goodness. And to this end, while the question whether
I have been duly patient and considerate and unbiassed by
passion or self-interest in taking account of the probable
consequences of my act, is an essential question — a question
which it only needs that I should be honest with myself,
not clever or well-informed, to answer— the question how
the action has turned out in respect of consequences which
I had not the requisite knowledge or ability to foresee, may
be left aside without practical harm. If indeed the question
as to motives and character, honestly dealt with, could leave
me under the impression that in doing so and so, I was all
thati should have been, it would be important for me to be
reminded that the action may have had evil consequences
which I did not foresee — perhaps in my dulness and ignor-
ance could not foresee — but which yet are part of my act.
But just because the question of motives and character,
honestly dealt with, is incompatible with self-complacency
in the contemplation of any piece of past conduct, its moral
function is fully served without supplementary enquiry into
unforeseen consequences of the conduct. It is a sufficient
spring for the endeavour after a higher goodness that
I should be ashamed of my selfishness, indolence, or im-
patience, without being ashamed also of my ignorance and
want of foresight. Without the former sort of shame, the
latter, if it could be engendered, would be morally barren ;
while, given that personal endeavour after the highest which
is the other side of self-abasement, this will turn the pro-
ducts of intellectual enlightenment and scientific discovery,
as they come, to account in the way of contribution to
human perfection. It will do this, and nothing else will.
307. If we are called on to say, then, whether a man will
.be any the wiser as to what he ought to do, or aiiy the more
disposed to do it, for applying an ideal of virtue to his o^^^n
368 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
conduct in the form of the question, Was I in this or that
piece of conduct what I should be ? we must point out that
this question itself expresses the source of all wisdom as to
what we ought to do. It expresses the aspiration, the effort,
in man to be the best that he has it in him to be, from which
is ultimately derived the thought that there is something
which ought to be done, and the enquiry what in particular
it is. It represents the quest for right conduct, as carried
on by the individual under that sense of personal responsi-
bility for doing the best, for attaining the highest, which can
alone make him a reformer of his own practice or of the
practice of others. It is true indeed that no recognition of
an ideal of virtue, however pure and high, no such incite-
ment to the reform of oneself and one's neighbour as a com-
parison of the ideal with current practice can afford, will
enlighten us as to the effect of different kinds of action upon
the welfare of society, whether that welfare be estimated
with reference to a maximum of possible pleasure, or to an
end which the realisation of a good will itself constitutes.
As it stands before the mind of any particular person, the
ideal will not directly yield an injunction to do anything in
particular which is not in his mind already associated with
good results, nor to abstain from anything which is not
already associated with evil results. But while it will not
immediately instruct him as to the physical or social conse-
quences of action, and through such instruction yield new
commands, it will keep him on the look-out for it, will open
his mind to it, will make him ready, as soon as it comes, to
interpret the instruction into a personal duty. The agents
in imparting the instruction may be analysts and experi-
menters, to whom the ideal of virtue is of little apparent
concern — who seldom trouble themselves with the question
whether they are what they should be — though, uiiless in
their intellectual employment they were controlled by an
ideal of perfect work, they would not prove the instructors
of mankind. But when the instruction has been conveyed,
the self-imposed imperative to turn it to account for the
CH. l] CONSCIENTIOUSNESS 369
bettering of life remains to be given ; and it is only from
a conscience responsive to an ideal of virtue that it can pro-
ceed. The lesson, for instance, of the mischief done by
indiscriminate almsgiving, or by the sale of spirits, may have
been most plainly taught by social or physical analysis, but
it would be practically barren unless certain persons, each
under a consciousness of responsibility for making the best
of himself as a social being, charged themselves with the task
of getting the lesson put into practice by society.
308. The notion that an ideal of virtue must be barren
in the suggestion of particular duties previously unrecogr
nised, has probably arisen from the necessity of expressing
it verbally in the form of a definition or of a general
proposition. From such a proposition as 'the true good
for man is the realisation of his capabilities, or the perfect-
ing of human life,' or ' the good will is a will which has such
perfection for its object,' — or, again, from a definition of
any particular form of the good will, of any specific virtue
— we may be fairly challenged to deduce any particular
obligation but such as is already included in the /notions
represented by the terms which stand as the subjects of
these several propositions. From a knowledge that the
true good, the good will, the specific virtues, are as defined,
no one will come to be aware of any particular duties of
which he was not aware before he arrived at the definitions.
The most that can be said (of which more below) will be
that such definitions may put him on his guard against gelt
sophistications, which might otherwise obscure to him, the
clearness of admitted duties. If the practical consciousness;
which we name an ideal of virtue, were no more than the
speculative judgment embodied in a definition of the ideal,
or than speculative reflection upon the ideal, the same
admission would have to be made in regard to it. But it is
much more than this; .or, rather, it does not primarily in-
volve any such speculative judgment at all, but only comes
to involve such a judgment as a secondary result of that
aspiration in men after a possible best of life and character,
Bb
370 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. iY
which primarily, constitutes the consciousness of the ideal.
Before a definition of the ideal can be possible, this aspi-
ration must have taken effect in the ordering of life ; and it
is reflection On the product which it has thus yielded that
suggests general statements as to the various virtues, and
as to some supreme virtue ; ultimately, as intellectual needs
increase, formal definitions of virtue and the virtues.
But the acquaintance of educated men with such defini-
tions, the employment of the analytical intellect upon them,
is very different from what we mean by the practical con-
sciousness of the moral ideal. This implies the continued
action in the individual of the same spiritual principle that
has yielded those forms of life and character which form
the subject of our moral definitions ; its continued action
as at once compelling dissatisfaction with the imperfection
of those forms, and creating a sensibility to the suggestions
of a further perfecting of life which they contain. A defini-
tion of virtue, a theory of the good, is quite a different
thing, in presence of such a living inward interpreter, from
what it would be as an abstract proposition. A proposition
of geometry, from which by mere analysis no truth could
be derived which was not already contained in it, becomes
fertile of new truth when applied by the geometer to a new
construction. A rule of law, barren to mere analysis, yields
new rules when interpreted by the judge in application to
new cases. And thus a general ethical proposition, which
by itself is merely a record of past moral judgments, and
from which by mere analysis no rules of conduct could be
derived but such as have- been already accepted and em-
bodied in it, becomes a source of new practical direction
when applied by a conscience, working under a felt necessity
of seeking the best, to circumstances previously not existent
or not considered, or to some new lesson of experience.
309. Our conclusion, then, is that the state of mind which
is now most naturally expressed by the unspoken questions.
Have I been what I should be, shall I be what I should be,
in doing so and so? is that in which all moral progress
CH.l] CONSCIENTIOUSNESS 371
originates. It must have preceded the formation of definite
ideals of character, as well as any articulation of the distinc-
tion between outward action and its motives. It is no other
than the sense of personal responsibility for making the best
of themselves in the family, the tribe, or the state, which
must have actuated certain persons, many or few, in order
to the establishment and recognition of any moral standards
whatever. Given such standards, it is the spirit which at
once demands from the individual a loyal conformity to
them, and disposes him, upon their suggestion, to construct
for himself an ideal of virtue, of personal goodness, higher
than they explicitly contain. The action of such an ideal,
in those stages of moral development with which we are
now familiar, is the essential condition of all further better-
ing of human life. Its action is of course partial in various
degrees of partiality. It may appear as a zeal for public
service on the part of some one not careful enough about
the correctness of his own life, or on the other hand in the
absorbed religious devotion of the saintly recluse. In the
average citizen it may appear only as the influence which
makes him conscientious in the discharge of work which
he would not suffer except in conscience for neglecting, or
as the voice, fitfully heard within, which gives meaning to
the announcement of a perfect life lived for him and some-
how to be made his own. Taking human society together,
its action m one mode supplements its action in another, and
the whole sum of its action forms the motive power of true
moral development ; which means the apprehension on our
part, ever widening and ever filling and ever more fully
responded to in practice, of our possibilities as men and
of the reciprocal claims and duties which those possibilities
imply.
B b 2
CHAPTER II
THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF A THEORY OF THE MORAL IDEAL
310. Supposing the considerations with which the last
chapter ended to be admitted, we have still only convinced
ourselves of the supreme value which belongs to an ideal
of personal goodness, as a principle of action. The value
of a certain theory of the ideal, of such a doctrine of the
good and of goodness as has been previously sketched in
this treatise, is a different question. It was this that we
undertook to consider, and this we have so far not directly
touched. Having taken the ideal to be a devotion of char-
acter and life in some form or other to the perfecting of
man ; having insisted that this perfection is to be understood
as itself consisting in a life of such self-devoted activity on
the part of all persons; we undertook to enquire what avail-
able criterion of right and wrong such a theory could afford;
how, applied to the circumstances of life, it could be con-
strued into particular duties, so as to give us some general
guide to the line of conduct we should adopt where conven-
tional morality fails us. This enquiry, it may be fairly said,
is not met by dwelling on the effect of a moral ideal, which
need not be, and generally is not, accompanied by any clear
theory of itself, in awakening the individual to a recognition
of new duties, as new situations arise and new experience is
acquired. The most genuine devotion to the highest ideal
of goodness will not save a man from occasional perplexity
as to the right line of action for him to take. If it seems to
do so, it will only be because, not being the highest kind of
devotion, it makes him confident in merely traditional or
inconsiderate judgments. If the perplexity were one which
admitted of being put in the form, Shall I be acting accord-
ing to my ideal of virtue, or as a good man should, in doing
so and so? a true devotion to the ideal might guide him
PRACTICAL VALUE OP MORAL THEORY 373
through it. But in that case, it may be argued, the practical
action of the ideal itself is enough. A theory about it, a
philosophy of the true good, is superfluous. But if, on the
other hand, the conscientious man's perplexity arises either
from a conflict between two authorities which seem to have
equal claims on his obedience, or from doubt as to the effect
of different courses of contemplated action, while mere
devotion to the ideal will not clear his path before him, of
what avail will be any instruction that we could give him in
accordance with our theory of the good and of goodness ?
311. The discussion of this question has been advisedly
postponed till we had considered the practical effect of an
ideal of goodness, as possessing a man who may as yet be
unacquainted with any philosophical theories about it. Any
value which a true moral theory may have for the direction
of conduct depends on its being applied and interpreted by
a mind which the ideal, as a practical principle, already
actuates. And it will be as well at once to admit that the
value must in any case be rather negative than positive ;
rather in the way of deliverance from the moral anarchy
which an apparent conflict between duties equally imperative
may bring about, or of providing a safeguard against the
pretext which in a speculative age some inadequate and mis-
applied theory may afford to our selfishness, than in the way
of pointing out duties previously ignored. This latter service
must always be rendered by the application of a mind, which
the ideal possesses, to new situations, to experience newly
acquired or newly analysed, rather than by reflection on any
theory of the ideal. Whether a mind so possessed and ap-
plied is philosophically instructed or no, is in most circum-
stances matter of indifference. One is sometimes, indeed,
tempted to think that Moral Philo^apfay i& only needed to
remedy the evils which it has itself caused; that if men were
not constrained by a necessity of their intellectual nature to
give abstract expression to their ideals, the particular mis-
leading suggestions, against which a true jjhilosophy is needed
to guard, would not be forthcoming.
374 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bK. IV
For these suggestions chiefly arise from the inadequacy
of the formulae in which requirements imposed by a really
valuable ideal have found intellectual expression. Under
influence of such an ideal institutions and rules of life are
formed, essential for their time and turn, but not fitted to
serve as the foundation of a universally binding prescription.
The generalising intellect, however, requires their embodi-
ment in universal rules j and when these are found to
conflict with each other, or with some demand of the self-
realising spirit which has not yet found expression in a
recognised rule, the result is an intellectual perplexity, of
which our lower nature is quite ready to take advantage.
Blind passion is enlisted in the cause of the several rules.
Egoistic interests are ready to turn any of them to account,
or to find an excuse for indulgence in what seems to be
their neutralisation of each other. Meanwhile perhaps
some nobler soul takes up that position of self-outlawry
which Wordsworth expresses in the words put into Rob
Roy's month : —
We have a passion— make a law,
Too false to guide us or control !
And for the law itself we fight
In bitterness of soul.
And, puzzled, blinded thus, we lose
Distinctions that are plain and few ;
These find I graven on my heart ;
That tells me what to do.
For deliverance from this state of moral anarchy, which in
various forms recurs whenever a sufficient liberation of the
intellectual faculties has been attained, there is needed a
further pursuit of the same speculative processes which have
brought it about. As has just been said, no good will come
of this, unless under the direction of a genuine interest in
the perfecting of man ; but, given this interest, it is only
through philosophy that it can be made independent of the
tonflicting, because inadequate, formulae in which duties are
presented to it, and saved from distraction between rival
CH. u] PRACTICAL VALVE OF MORAL THEORY 375
authorities, of which the injunctions seem at once absolute
and irreconcilablej because their origin is not understood.
312. But philosophy itself in its results may yield oppor-
tunity to a self-excusing egoism. The formulae in which
it expresses conceptions of moral ends and virtues must
always be liable to proVe misleading, in the absence of that
living interest in a practically true ideal which can alone
elicit their higher significance. They are generated in
intellectual antagonism and must always probably retain
the marks of their origin. Those which have served the
purpose of enabling men to see behind and beyond their
own moral prejudices or some absolute authoritative asser-
tion of a merely relative duty, have not themselves conveyed
complete and final truth. If they had done so, it would
still have been a truth that could only be made instructive
for men's guidance in their moral vocation, if applied to the
particulars of life by a mind bent on the highest. But in
fact the best practical philosophy of any age has never been
more than an assertion of partial truths, which had some
special present function to fulfil in the deliverance or
defence of the human soul. When they have done their
work, these truths become insufficient for the expression of
the highest practical convictions operating in man, while
the speculative intellect, if enlisted in the service of the
pleasure-seeking nature, can easily extract excuses from
them for evading the cogency of those convictions. But
the remedy for this evil is still not to be found in the
abandonment of philosophy, but in its further pursuit.
The. spring of all moral progress, indeed, can still lie no-
where else than in the attraction of heart and will by the
ideal of human perfection, and in the practical convictions
which arise from it ; but philosophy will still be needed as
the interpreter of practical conviction, and it can itself
alone provide for the adequacy of the interpretation.
313. This general account of the practical function which
a philosophy of conduct has to serve will probably carry
more conviction, if we consider some particular forms of
376 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
perplexity as to right conduct in which philosophy might
be of service, and again some instances of the oppprtunity
which an inadequate philosophy may offer to egoistic ten-
dencies. A previous reminder, however, may be needed
that a case of perplexity as to right conduct, if it is to be
one in which philosophy can serve a useful purpose, must
be one of bona fide perplexity of conscience. Now the
margin within which such perplexities can arise in a Christian
society is not really very large. The effort after an ideal
of conduct has so far taken effect in the establishment of
a recognised standard of what is due from man to man, that
the articulation of the general imperative, ' Do what is best
for mankind V into particular duties is sufficiently clear and
full for the ordinary occasions of life. In fulfilling the
duties which would be recognised as belonging to his station
in life by any one who considered the matter dispassionately,
without bias by personal inclination — in fulfilling them
loyally, without shirking, 'not with eye-service as men-
pleasers,' — we can seldom go wrong ; and when we have
done this fully, there will seldom be much more that we
can do. The function of bringing home these duties to the
consciences of men — of helping them to be honest with
themselves in their recognition and interpretation of them —
is rather that of the preacher than of the philosopher.
Speculatively there is much for the philosopher to do in ex-
amining how that ordering of life has arisen, to which these
duties are relative ; what is the history of their recognition ;
what is the rationale of them ; what is the most correct ex-
pression for the practical ideas which underlie them. And,
as we shall see, there may be circumstances which give this
speculative enquiry a practical value. These circumstances,
however, must always be exceptional. Ordinarily it will be
an impertinence for the philosopher to pretend either to sup-
plement or to supersede those practical directions of conduct,
' I use this as a fair popular equivalent of Kant's formula — 'Treat
humanity, whether in your person or in that of another, never merely
as a means, always at the same time as an end.'
CH. II] PERPLEXITY OF CONSCIENCE 377
which are supplied by the duties of his station to any one
who is free from any selfish interest in ignoring them.
314. Perplexity of conscience, properly so called, seems
always to arise from conflict between different formulae for
expressing the ideal of good in human conduct, or between
different institutions for furthering its realisation, which have
alike obtained authority over men's minds without being in-
trinsically entitled to more than a partial and relative obe-
dience ; or from the incompatibility of some such formula or
institution, on the one side, with some moral impulse of the
individual on the other, which is really an impulse towards
the attainment of human perfection, but cannot adjust itself
to recognised rules and established institutions. From the
perplexities thus occasioned we must distinguish those that
arise from difficulty in the analysis of circumstances or in the
forecast of the effects of actions. These are to be met, no
doubt, by an exercise of the intellect, but by its exercise
rather in the investigation of matters of fact than by that
reflection upon ideas which is properly called philosophy.
From both kinds of practical perplexity again are to be
distinguished those self-sophistications which arise from a
desire to find excuses for gratifying unworthy inclinations.
Such self-sophistications, we know, will often dignify them-
selves with the title of cases of conscience ; and the disrepute
which has fallen upon ' casuistry ' has been partly due to its
having often been employed in their service. A man will
pretend to be perplexed with a case of conscience, when
really he is wishing to make out that some general rule
of conduct does not apply to him, because its fulfilment
would cause him trouble, or because it conflicts with some
passion which he wishes to indulge. Most cases in which
we argue that circumstances modify for us the obligation to
veracity are of this kind. When such is the source of the
'perplexity,' it is not the most perfect philosophy, the
completest possible theory of the moral ideal, that will be of
avail for deliverance from it. Just so far as the character
is formed to disinterested loyalty to the moral law, however
378 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
imperfectly the law may be conceived, it will brush aside
the fictitious embarrassment. As Kant puts it, that emotion
which on one side is ' Achtung ' for the moral law, on the
other is ' Verachtung ' for one's selfish inclinations. Such an
emotion may not save a man from many concessions to his
own weakness, but it will make him refuse with contempt to
resort to casuistry for their justification. He may be en-
lightened enough to appreciate the relativity of most general
rules of conduct, to understand that they admit of exceptions
according to circumstances, but he will despise the suggestion
of an exception to them in his own favour — an exception in
order to save himself pain or gain himself pleasure. This
sort of self-contempt affords a short method of settling ques-
tions to which the speculative intellect, if once it so far enlists
itself in the service of passion as to treat them seriously, will
' find no end, in wandering mazes lost.'
315. There may be cases, however, in which the difficulty
felt in adhering to a general rule, such as that of veracity,
arises from an impulse entitled in itself to as much respect
as the conscientious injunction to adhere to the rule. A
famous example is the temptation of Jeannie Deans to give
false evidence on a single point for the sake, of saving her
sister, of whose substantial innocence she is assured. In
such a case would Moral Philosophy, if it could gain a hear-
ing, have any direction to give to the perplexed person ? He
is asking himself, Shall I in this case be acting as I ought,
as a good man should, in adhering to the strict rule of veracity,
or in departing from it to save the beloved person from
a punishment which I know to be undeserved ? Whatever
the principle of our Moral Philosophy, can it help in answer-
ing the question ? The Utilitarian theory, which is apt to
take credit to itself for special practical availability, can here
have no counsel to give. For by what possible calculus could
the excess, on the whole, of pleasure over pain or of pain over
pleasure, to be expected from adherence to the rule of vera-
city, be balanced against the excess of pleasure over pain or
of pain over pleasure, to be expected in the particular case
CH. ll] PERPLEXITY OF CONSCIENCE 379
from its violation ? But if we suppose the question to be
dealt with according to the principles advocated in this
treatise, we do not escape embarrassment. How shall the
perplexed person say whether the motive which suggests
adherence to the rule of veracity, or that which suggests
departure from it, is the worthier of the two ? A true Moral
Philosophy does not recognise any value in conformity to
a universal rule, simply as such, but only in that which ordin-
arily issues in such conformity, viz. the readiness to sacrifice
every lower inclination in the desire to do right for the sake
of doing it. But in the case supposed, may not the desire
to save the beloved person, known to be substantially inno-
cent, claim to be a disinterested desire to do right equally
with a determination to adhere to the strict rule of veracity ?
316. If the moral philosopher were called on to answer
this question as a matter of general speculation, not for the
guidance of a particular person in a particular case, he
would have to say that it did not admit of being answered
with a simple ' yes ' or ' no.' For purposes of moral
valuation neither the desire to save the life of the beloved
person, nor the determination at any cost to adhere to the
rule of strict veracity, can be detached from the relation
which it bears to the whole history of a life, to the universe
of a character ; and this relation is not in any case ascer-
tainable by us. Of two men, placed in precisely similar
perplexities, one might adhere to the rule of veracity at the
cost of sacrificing the life of a beloved and innocent person,
the other might save the person at the cost of violating the
rule of veracity, and it would be impossible for the moral
philosopher to say which action were the better or the worse
of the two ; because he would not know in regard to either
that spiritual history upon which its moral value depends.
If on the other hand (an unlikely supposition) he had to
assist the perplexed conscience' in deciding between the
' [The expression 'perplexed conscience'' would probably have been
modified on revision, in accordance with the distinctions laid down in
§ 321-]
380 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bK. IV
alternative actions in such a case as that supposed, he would
have to press the question whether it is not at bottom some
personal weakness which suggests the departure from the
ordinary moral rule ; whether it is really a greater devotion to
the beloved person that suggests a falsehood for her sake,
and not perhaps a backwardness to serve her in some more
difficult and dangerous way, in which she might still be
served though she had to bear the consequence of the truth
being told. If that consequence should prove to be her
painful and undeserved death, ' What are you,' the doubter
must be asked, 'what is the victim whom your untruth
might save, that the suffering of either should be set against
the duty of adherence to a rule, of which the universal
observance is a prime condition of the perfect ordering of
social life, and therefore morally necessary ? Each of you,
no doubt, has an absolute value which no rule, as such, can
have. Rules are made for man, not man for rules. But
the question is not really between the value of either of
you ahd the value of a rule, but between the importance to
be attached on the one hand to your pain or deliverance
from pain, and that to be attached on the other to the moral
life of society which every lie must injure, and to the integrity
of your character as a person self subordinated to the require-
ments of social good. Let the worst come from your truth-
speaking ; still it is not that which is of absolute value, either
in you or in the victim of the law, which will suffer loss.
Your devotion to the beloved person is indeed truly a good ;
but that devotion is not set aside by, but carried on into, the
larger devotion which includes it, and which forbids your
departure from the rule of veracity. As to the beloved person
herself, the question is more dark, for she is passive in the
matter ; it is not any action to be done by her that is under
consideration, and no one can gain directly in intrinsic worth
by the action of another. But it is certain that her deliver-
ance from suffering through your wrong-doing could not be
really for her good ; it would not make her heart purer, or
direct her will to higher objects ; and you may trust on the
CH. Il] PERPLEXITY OF CONSCIENCE 381
other hand (though unable to foresee how such a result
should come about) that in taking that consequence of her
conduct, which only your wrong-doing could avert, she will
gain in that spiritual capability which is alone to her a source
of abiding good.'
317. The suggestion of such counsel being offered to any
one under such trial as we have supposed, inevitably strikes
us as inappropriate. We know that in fact under such
circumstances the soul would not be at leisure for philoso-
phical reflection. Its conduct must be determined by in-
fluences that act more swiftly and decisively ; if in the severe
path for which we have supposed the philosopher to be
arguing, by an inbred horror of falsehood, which does not
•wait to give an account of itself, or by sense of the presence
of a divine onlooker, whose disapproval, not for fear of penal
consequences but for very shame, cannot be faced. Accord-
ing to the distinction previously drawn, it is the action of an
ideal of virtue itself, not any theory about the ideal, that can
alone be efficient in such a case. Though not in the emer-
gency itself, however, yet in preparing the soul for it, a true
philosophy may have an important service to render. It
will be a service, indeed, rather of the defensive and negative
than of the actively inciting kind — a service which in a specula-
tive and dialectical age needs to be rendered, lest the hold of
the highest moral ideas on the mind should be weakened
from apparent lack of intellectual justification.
Those ideas, as we have often pointed out, are not abstract
conceptions. They actuate men independently of the opera-
tions of the discursive intellect. They rather direct those
operations than are their result. The idea, in its various
forms, of something that human life should be, of a perfect
being for whom this ' should be ' already ' is,' cannot pro-
ceed from observation of matters of fact or from inference
founded on such observation, though in various ways (on
which we cannot here dwell) it regulates that observation
and inference. Such ideas or principles of action, at work
before they are understood, not only give rise to institutions
382 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
and iTipdes of life, but also express themselves in forms ot
the imagination. In complication with effects of passion
and force, they produce the laws, whether enforced by
opinion or by the magistrate, which form the essential and
permanent element in the fabric of social obligation; and
they also yield the imagination of a supreme invisible but
all-seeing ruler, to whom service is due, from whom com-
mands proceed as from an earthly superior — the head ot
a family or the sovereign of a state— and who punishes the
violation of those commands. It is in the form of this
imagination that, in the case at least of all ordinary good
people, the idea of an absolute duty is so brought to bear
on the soul as to yield an awe superior to any personal in-
clination. In sudden calls upon the will, when the sustain-
ing force of habit is of no avail, when no rewards or penalties,
either under the law of the state or the law of opinion, are
to be looked for, whatever the course of action adopted, can
any of us be sure that, except under the impression of the
' great task-master's eye ' upon him, he would do the work
which upon reflection he would admit should be done ?
318. It is a necessity, however, of our rational nature
that these forms of imagination, in which our highest prac-
tical ideas have found expression, should be subject to
criticism. Is there really a divine ruler, who issues com-
mands which we can obey or disobey ; who somehow sees
and hears us, though not through eye or ear; whom it is
possible for us to please or offend ? Now there is undoubt-
edly a sense in which these questions, once asked, can only
be answered in the negative. The most convinced Theist
must admit that God is as unimaginable as He is unper-
ceivable,— unimaginable because unperceivable, for that
which we imagine (in the proper sense of the term) has the
necessary finiteness of that which we perceive ; that state-
ments, therefore, which in any strict sense could only be
applied to an imaginable finite agent, cannot in any such
sense be applied to God. As applied to Him, they must
at any rate not be reasoned from as we reason from state-
CH. ll] PERPLEXITY OF CONSCIENCE 383
ments about matters of fact. The practice of treating them
as if they were such statements, with the confusions and
contradictions to which it inevitably leads, only enhances
doubt as to the reality of the divine Spirit ; of which we
must confess that it is inexpressible in its nature by us,
though operative in us through those practical ideas of a
possible perfect life, of a being for whom this perfect life
is already actual, which, acting upon imagination, yield the
language of ordinary religion.
319. Now when criticism comes to do its inevitable work
upon the language of imagination in which our fundamental
moral ideas have found expression, a counter-work is called
for from philosophy, which has an important bearing upon
conduct. It has to disentangle the operative ideas from
their necessarily imperfect expression, and to explain that
the validity of the ideas themselves, as principles of action,
is not affected by the discovery that the language, in which
men under their influence naturally express themselves, has
not the sort of truth which belongs to a correct statement
of matters of fact. It has to show when and how — these
ideas not being matters of fact or obtained by abstraction
from matters of fact — the figures of speech employed in
expressing the aspirations and endeavours to which they
give rise, being derived by metaphor from sensible matters
of fact, are liable to mislead us if we argue from them as
though they conveyed literal truth. It has to point out
what is the sense in which, alone the question as to the
truth of such language can be properly asked or answered.
If the question is asked, for instance, whether there is truth
in the language, habitual to the religious conscience, in
which God is represented as giving us certain commands
and seeing whether we perform them or no, the philosopher
will remind us that to enquire whether such language is true,
in the same sense in which it might be true that I ordered
my servant to do certain things this morning and took notice
whether he did them, is as inappropriate as it would be to
enquire (according to an example employed by Locke in
384 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bK. IY
-another connection) whether sleep is swift or virtue square.
It can only be reasonably asked whether it is true in the
sense that it naturally expresses, in terms of imagination, an
emotion arising from consciousness of a relation which really
subsists between the human soul and God. If the infinite
Spirit so communicates itself to the soul of man as to yield
the idea of a possible perfect life, and that consequent sense
of personal responsibility on the part of the individual for
making the best of himself as a social being from which the
recognition of particular duties arises, then it is a legitimate
expression by means of metaphor — the only possible means,
except action, by which the consciousness of spiritual real-
ities can express itself — to say that our essential duties are
commands of God. If again the self-communication of the
infinite Spirit to the soul of man is such that man is con-
scious of his relation to a conscious being, who is in eternal
perfection all that man has it in him to come to be, then it
is a legitimate expression of that conscious relation by means
of metaphor to say that God sees whether His commands
are fulfilled by us or no, and an appropriate emotion to feel
shame as in His presence for omissions or violations of duty
incognisable by other men.
320. The above must not be taken to mean that it is to
be considered the business of philosophy to justify the lan-
guage of religious imagination universally and uncondition-
ally. Even . as that language is current in Christendom,
there may be much in it that a true moral philosophy will
have to condemn as inconsistent with the highest kind of
moral conviction. Objection may properly be taken, for
instance, to the ordinary representation of God as a source
of rewards and penalties; as rewarding goodness with certain
pleasures bestowed from without, as punishing wickedness
with pains inflicted from without. The objection to it, how-
ever, is not that it represents God under a figure which is
not a statement of fact (for the same objection would apply
equally to all the language of religion), but that the figure is
one which interferes with the true idea of goodness as its
CH. II ] PERPLEXITY OF CONSCIENCE 385
own reward, of vice as its own punishment. It is an im-
portant function of philosophy to examine the current lan-
guage of religious imagination, not with the unreasonable
view of testing its speculative truth, as we might test the
truth of some doctrine about natural phenomena, but in
order to satisfy ourselves whether it worthily expresses the
emotions of a soul in which the highest moral ideas have
done their perfect work.
With such an application of philosophy, however, we are
not at present concerned. Our present purpose is merely
to point out the service which philosophy may render to
practical morality in counteracting the advantage which
scepticism may otherwise give to passion against duty. It
is true, of course, that when the soul is suddenly called
upon to face some awful moment, to which are joined great
issues for good or evil in its moral history, it is not by
' going over the theory of virtue in one's mind,' not by any
philosophical consideration of the origin and validity of
moral ideas, that the right determination can be given.
A judgment of the sort we call intuitive — a judgment which
in fact represents long courses of habit and imagination
founded on ideas — is all that the occasion admits of. But
even in such cases it may make a great difference to the
issue, whether the inclination to the weaker or less worthy
course is or is not assisted by a suggestion from the intellect
that the counter-injunction of conscience is illusory. And
in such an age as ours this suggestion is likely to be forth-
coming, if scepticism has been allowed to pull to pieces the
imaginative vesture in which our formative practical ideas
have clothed themselves, without a vindication by philo-
sophy of the ultimate authority of the ideas themselves, and
of so much in the language of religious imagination as is
their pure and (to us) necessary expression.
321. We have still, however, to consider the service which
philosophy may render in what we distinguished above as
iona fide perplexities of conscience ; bona fide perplexities, as
distinct from those self-sophistications, born of the pleasure-
c c
386 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
seeking impulse, in dealing with which philosophy would
be misapplied ; perplexities of conscience, as distinct from
cases like that of Jeannie Deans, where conscience speaks
without ambiguity but is opposed by an impulse in itself
noble and disinterested. In cases of this latter kind philo-
sophy may, as we have seen, under special conditions of
intellectual culture, have an important service to render;
but it will not be in the way of setting aside apparent con-
tradictions in the deliverance of conscience. It will rather
be in the way of vindicating the real authority of that
deliverance against a scepticism which might otherwise take
advantage of the discovery that the forms of imagination,
in which the deliverance is clothed, are not the same as
statements of speculative truth. The kind of practical
perplexity which we have now to consider arises not from
any doubt as to the authority of conscience, nor from
any attempt of selfish inclination to 'dodge' conscience
by assuming its disguise, but from the fact that the
requirements of conscience seem to be in conflict with
each other. However disposed to do what his conscience
enjoins, the man finds it difficult to decide what its injunc-
tion is.
In the crisis, for instance, through which several European
states have recently passed, such a difficulty might naturally
occur to a good Catholic who was also a loyal subject.
His conscience would seem to enjoin equally obedience to
the law of the State, and obedience to the law of the Church.
But these laws were in conflict. Which then was he to obey ?
It is a form of the same difficulty which in earlier days must
have occurred to Quakers and Anabaptists, to whom the
law derived from Scripture seemed contradictory to that of
the State, and to those early Christians for whom the law
which they disobeyed in refusing to sacrifice retained any
authority. In still earlier times it may have arisen in the
form of that conflict between the law of the family and the
law of the State, presented in the ' Antigone.' Nor is the
case really different when the modern citizen, in his capacity
OH. n] PERPLEXITY OF CONSCIENCE 387
as an ofificial or as a soldier, is called upon to help in putting
down some revolutionary movement which yet presents itself
to his inmost conviction as the cause of 'God and the People.'
This case may indeed appear different from those previously
noticed, because, while those were cases of conflict between
acknowledged authorities, this may seem rather to be one of
conflict between private opinion and authority. But if the
private opinion is more than 'a conceit which it is pleasant
to air ; if it is a source of really conscientious opposition to
an authority which equally appeals to the conscience ; if, in
other words, it is an expression which the ideal of human
good gives to itself in the mind of the man who entertains
it ; then it too rests on a basis of social authority. No in-
dividual can make a conscience for himself. He always needs
a society to make it for him. A conscientious ' heresy,'
religious or political, always represents some gradually
maturing conviction as to social good, already implicitly
involved in the ideas on which the accepted rules of conduct
rest, though it may conflict with the formulae in which those
ideas have been hitherto authoritatively expressed, and may
lead to the overthrow of institutions which have previously
contributed to their realisation.
322. In preparation for the times when conscience is thus
liable to be divided against itself, much practical service may
be rendered by a philosophy which, without depreciating
the authority of conscience as such, can explain the origin
of its conflicting deliverances, and, without pronouncing un-
conditionally for either, can direct the soul to the true end
to which each in some qualified way is relative. In order to
illustrate this in more detail, we will suppose a philosopher,
holding the doctrines previously stated in this treatise, to be
called upon for counsel in difficulties of the kind just noticed.
It will of course occur to every one that the counsel given
goes too far back in its reasons, and in its conclusions is of
too neutral a kind, to command attention in times of social
or religious conflict and revolution. But, though this is so,
it might have its effect upon the few who lead the many, in
c c 2
388 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
preparing the mind through years of meditation for the days
when prompt practical decision is required.
The philosopher, then, will begin by considering how
the seeming contradiction in the deliverances of conscience
comes about. He will point out that, though there would
be no such thing as conscience at all but for the conscious-
ness on the part of the individual that there is an uncon-
ditional good which, while independent of his likes and
dislikes, is yet his good — though this consciousness is as
irremovable as morality — yet it does not follow that all the
judgments which arise out of this consciousness are uncon-
ditionally valid. The several dicta of conscience have had
their history. Passing beyond the stage of mere conformity
to custom, of mere obedience to persons and powers that
be — a conformity and obedience which themselves arise
out of an operative, though inarticulate, idea of common
good — men have formed more or less general notions of
the customs and powers, as entitled to their conformity and
obedience. Certain formulae, expressing the nature of the
authorities to which obedience is due, and their most
familiar requirements, have become part of 'the a priori
furniture' of men's minds, in the sense that they are
accepted as valid independently of those lessons of ex-
perience which men are conscious of acquiring for them-
selves. Such are what are commonly called the ' dicta of
conscience.' Certain injunctions of family duty, of obedience
to the law of the State, of conformity to a law of honour or
opinion, have assumed this character. So too in Christen-
dom have certain ordinances of the Church, notwithstanding
much variety of opinion as to what constitutes the Church.
323. Now in all such deliverances of conscience the con-
tent of the obligation is blended with some conception or
imagination of an authority imposing the obligation, in
a combination which only the trained analytical intellect cart
disentangle. Just as to children the duty of speaking the
truth seems inseparable from tlie parental command to do
so, so to many a simple Catholic, for instance, the fact that
CH. ll] PERPLEXITY OF CONSCIENCE 389
the Church commands him to live cleanly and honestly seems
the source of the obligation so to live. To give just measure
and to go to Mass are to him homogeneous duties ; just as
to unenlightened persons in a differently ordered religious
community to give just measure and to observe the Sabbath
may be so. An abrogation of the authority which imposes
the ceremonial obligation would seem to imply a disappear-
ance of the moral obligation as well ; because this too in the
mind of the individual has become associated with the
imagination of an imponent authority, the same as that
which enjoins the ceremonial observance. This does not
arise from the existence of a Church as a co-ordinate institu-
tion with the State. Were there no Church, the difference
would only be that, as in the Grseco-Roman world, the
State would gather to itself the sentiments of which, as it is,
the Church seems the more natural object. Moral duties
would still be associated with the imagination of an imponent
authority, whose injunctions they would be supposed to be,
though the authority might be single instead of twofold.
Nor would any considerate member of modern society,
even the most enlightened, venture to say that his sense of
moral duty was independent of some such imagination of an
imponent, however resolutely he might refuse to recognise
either the Church or any particular personage as the impo-
nent. If he has ceased to describe himself naturally as a
good Catholic or good Churchman, he may still attach sig-
nificance to the description of himself as a good Christian ;
and this probably implies to him the recognition of an im-
ponent of obligation in the founder of the Christian society
or the author of a Christian revelation. Or if he has ceased
to recognise such an imponent, he probably still calls him-
self a loyal subject ; and in so doing expresses the fact that
he presents to himself some personal external source — some
source other than a spirit working in him — of the law which
he obeys ; and that he obeys the law, not from fear of pains
and penalties, but from reverence for the authority from
which he believes it to proceed — as much, therefore, when
39° PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
he might evade it with impunity as when he runs the risk of
punishment. Perhaps there may be no ostensible person,
no emperor or king, whom he regards as the author of the
law which he obeys, and he may accordingly prefer to describe
himself as a loyal citizen rather than as a loyal subject, but
he is very exceptional if he does not still think of some
association of persons, a ' sovereign people,' as the authority
from which law proceeds. If he ceased to present such an
/authority to himself, having previously discarded the imagi-
nation of Church or King or Divine Lawgiver as imponents
of duty, he WQuld_bfi_ap);_toj5ild. the obligation, not only of
' what is local and temporary in positive law, but of what is
essential in the moral law, slipping away from him.
324. This imagination of an external imponent, however,
is not intrinsically necessary to the consciousness of what we
call metaphorically' moral law, while it is the source of
apparent conflict between different injunctions of conscience.
[it is the very essence of moral duty to be imposed by a man
Ion himself. The moral duty to obey a positive law, whether
a law of the State or oT theT^urch, is imposed not by the
author or enforcer of the positive law, but by_that-spirit-nf
man — not less divine because the spirit of man — which sets
before him the ideal of a perfect life, and pronounces obedi-
ence to The^ositiveTawTo'be necessary to its realisation.
This actual imposition, however, of duties by man upon him-
self precedes and is independent of a true conception of what
duty is. Men who are really a law to themselves, in the sense
that it is their idea of an absolute ' should be,' of some per-
fection to be realised in and by them, that is the source of
the general rule of life which they observe, are yet unable to
present that rule to themselves as anything else than the in-
junction of some external authority. It is this state of mind
' I say ' metaphorically,' because what we primarily understand by
' law ' is some sort of command, given by a superior in power to one
whom he is able to punish for disobedience ; whereas it is the essence
of moral ' law ' that it is a rule which a man imposes on himself, and
from another motive than the fear of punishment.
CH. Il] PERPLEXITY OF CONSCIENCE 391
that renders them liable to the perplexities of conscience
described, in which duties appear to conflict with each
other.
There is no such thing really as a conflict of duties.
A man's duty under any particular set of circumstances is
always one, though the conditions of the case may be so
complicated and obscure as to make it difficult to decide
what the duty really is. That which we are apt to call
a conflict of duties is really a competition of reverences for
imagined imponents of duty, whose injunctions, actual or
. supposed, do not agree. A woman perhaps finds herself
directed to act in one way by her father, in another by her
confessor. A citizen may find himself similarly distracted
between the law of the State and that of the Church ; or
between the ordinance of an ostensible sovereign and that
of a revolutionary committee, claiming to act in the name of
God and the People. In such cases, if the conscience were
clear of prepossession in favour of this authority or that, and
were simply prepared to recognise as duty the course which
contributes most to the perfect life, it might yet be difficult
enough to ascertain what this course of action would be,
though there would be no doubt that the one duty was to
pursue that course of action when ascertained. But the
actual perplexity of conscience in such cases commonly
arises not from this difficulty, but from the habit of identi-
fying duty with injunctions given by external authorities,
and from the fact that in the supposed case the injunctions
so given are inconsistent with each other.
325. Now the task of the moral philosopher in regard to
such cases would be a comparatively easy one, if it simply
consisted in trying to rid a man of his illusions of conscience;
if he had merely to point out the work of imagination in
ascribing the essential duties which conscience enjoins to an
external imponent, and to show that the apparent conflict of
duties is in fact merely a conflict between certain external
authorities which are wrongly supposed to impose duties,
whereas all that a purely external authority can impose is
392 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
a command enforced by fear. If the philosopher aims at
no more than this, he may succeed in his work, but its value
will be doubtful. It may prove easier to convince men that
duties; in the moral sense, cannot be imposed from without
than, when this has been shown, to maintain the conviction
that they exist at all. If the result of the philosopher's work
is to popularise the notion that the authorities to which men
have chiefly looked as imponents of duties, are merely powers
able to induce obedience to their commands by threat of
punishment for disobedience, without substitution of any
new reverence for that which must be withdrawn from the
authorities so regarded, we shall have nothing to thank him
for. In truth the phrase ' external authority,' as applied to
the imagined imponents of duty, involves something of a
contradiction. If they were merely external, they would
not be authorities, for an authority implies, on the part of
the man to whom it is an authority, a conception of its
having a claim upon his obedience ; and this again implies
that his obedience to it is a self-imposed obedience— an
obedience which commends itself to his reason as good,
irrespectively of penalties attached to disobedience. The
authority, in being recognised as an authority, has ceased to
be a mere source of commands, enforced by fear of punish-
ment for their violation, and in that sense to be merely
external. Its injunctions now commend themselves to the
subject of them, not indeed as proceeding from a spirit
which is his own or himself, but as directed to the attain-
ment of an end in which the subject is interested on his
own account ; which is, and is known by him to be, his true
good. How the several injunctions in detail contribute to
such an end he does not see ; but he trusts the authority
from which they proceed to have it more completely in view
than he can himself. It is thus that the Church is an au-
thority to the good Catholic, the State to the good citizen,
the Bible to the orthodox Protestant. In each case the
acknowledgment of the authority has become one and the
same thing with the individual's presentation to himself of
CH. ll] PERPLEXITY OF CONSCIENCE 393
a true good, at once his own and the good of others, which
it is his business to pursue.
326. Now it would be a blundering and reckless proce-
dure on the part of the moral philosopher, if he were first
to construe too literally the language in which these authori-
ties are described, so to speak, from without for rhetorical
or logical purposes, — to take it as if it represented their true
spiritual import for those who acknowledge them — and then,
in his hurry to assert the truth that a moral obligation can-
not be imposed from without, were to seek to dethrone them
from their place in the moral imagination, and to substitute
for them an improvised conscience that should make its own
laws de novo from within. It must rather be his object,
without setting aside any of the established authorities which
have acquired a hold on the conscience, to awaken such an
understanding of the impulse after an ideal of conduct
which, without being understood, has expressed itself in
these authorities, as may gradually render men independent
of the mode of its authoritative expression. One who has
learnt this lesson will have a rationale of the various duties
presented to him in the name of Caesar or of God, which
will help him to distinguish what is essential in the duties
from the form of their imposition, and to guide himself by
looking to the common end to which they are alike relative.
Should an occasion arise when the duties seem to conflict,
he will be prepared for the discovery that the conflict is not
really between duties, but between powers invested by the
imagination with the character of imponents of duty. He
will be able to stand this discovery without moral deteriora-
tion, because he has learnt to fix his eye on the moral end
or function — the function in the way of furthering perfec-
tion of conduct — served by the authorities which he has
been bred to acknowledge. He can thus find in that end,
or in the Spirit whose self-communication renders him
capable of seeking it, a fit object for all the reverences
claimed by those authorities, and which he now discovers to
be due to them only by a derived and limited title.
327. It may thus fall to the moral philosopher, under
394 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
certain conditions of society and of intellectual movement,
to render an important practical service. But he will render
it simply by fulfilling with the utmost possible completeness
his proper work of analysis. As a moral philosopher he
analyses human conduct; the motives which it expresses,
the spiritual endowments implied in it, the history of thought,
habits and institutions through which it has come to be
what it is. He does not understand his business as a
philosopher, if he claims to do more than this. He will
not take it for a reproach to be reminded that no philo-
sopher can supply a 'moral dynamic' The pretension to
do so he would regard as a great impertinence. He finds
moral dynamic enough in the actual spiritual nature of man,
when that nature is regarded, as it is his business to regard
it, not merely in its hitherto performance, but in its intrinsic
possibilities. If he cannot help wishing for more, that is
an incident of the very aspiration after perfection of conduct
which constitutes the dynamic. His immediate business
as a philosopher is not to strengthen or heighten this aspira-
tion, much less to bring it into existence, but to understand
it. As a man and a citizen, indeed, it is his function to
serve as its organ ; to give effect to it in his own conduct,
to assist in communicating it to others. And since in being
a philosopher he does not cease to be a man and a citizen,
he will rejoice that the analysis, which alone forms his
employment as a philosopher, should incidentally serve
a purpose subordinate to the 'moral dynamic' — that it
should help to remove any obstacle to the effort of the
human soul after a perfect life.
The distraction of conscience caused, as we have seen, by
competition of reverences for authorities whose injunctions
come into conflict with each other, may form such an
obstacle. Its outward effect may sometimes be a paralysis
of action ; sometimes, on the other hand, hasty and embit-
tered action in opposition to one of the causes or authorities
between the claims of which conscience is perplexed — action
hasty and embittered for the very reason that the agent is
afraid to face the consequence of dispassionate enquiry into
CH. li] PERPLEXITY OF CONSCIENCE 395
the validity of the claims to which he blindly submits. So
far as the impediment to the highest living, to the free
development of human capabilities, is of this kind, the phi-
losopher by mere thoroughness and completeness of ethical
analysis may help to remove it. By giving the most adequate
account possible of the moral ideal; by considering the
process through which the institutions and rules of life, of
which we acknowledge the authority, have arisen out of the
effort, however blindly directed, after such an ideal, and
have in their several measures contributed to its realisation ;
by showing that conscience in the individual, while owing
its education to those institutions and rules, is not properly
the mere organ of any or all of them, but may freely and in
its own right apprehend the ideal of which they are more or
less inadequate expressions ; by thus doing his proper work
as a philosopher of morals, he may help the soul to rise
above the region of distraction between competing authori-
ties, or between authorities and an inner law, to a region in
which it can harmonise all the authorities by looking to the
end to which they, or whatever is really authoritative in
them, no less than the inner law, are alike relative.
328. That the soul, however, should derive any such
benefit from philosophy implies a previous discipUne, which
cannot be derived from philosophy, but only from conduct
regulated by the authorities which philosophy teaches it to
understand. It is a complaint as old as the time of Plato
that, in learning to seek for the rationale of the rules which
they are trained to obey — to enquire what is the ideal of
human good, which these rules serve and are justified by
serving — men come to find excuses for disregarding them.
And, no doubt, as Plato saw, till the character is set in the
direction of the ideal, a theory of the ideal can be of no
value for the improvement of conduct in any sense. It
may be doubted, indeed, whether the apparent mischief,
which arises in a speculative age from the habit of asking
a reason why for the rules of respectability, does more than
affect the excuses made for acts of self-indulgence of which
men, innocent of criticism or speculation, would equally be
396 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY
guilty. But, however this may be, it remains true that the
value of the Dialectic which asks and gives such an account
of ideal good as at once justifies and limits obedience to
practical authorities, is conditional upon its finding in the
individual a well-formed habitual morality.
When it does so, it may influence life for good, by
enlisting in the real service of mankind the zeal which would
otherwise become a mis-directed loyalty or a spirit of un-
profitable rebellion. It will teach a man to question the
absoluteness of the authorities which speak in the name of
Csesar and of God — not with a view to shirking the precepts
of either in the interest of his own pleasures, but in order
that he may not be led by either into a 'conscientious'
opposition to the other, obstructive to the work of which
the promotion in different ways is the true function of each.
When he finds that the requirements of Church or State,
the observances of conventional morality or conventional
religion, are in conflict with what some plead as their con-
scientious convictions, it will make him watchful to ascertain
whether these new convictions may not represent a truer
effort after the highest ideal than that embodied in the
authorities which seek to suppress them. On the other
hand, when he finds some conviction of his own in conflict
with authority, it will teach him not indeed to conceal it
for fear of inconvenient consequences, but to suppress all
pride in it as if it were an achievement of his own ; to regard
it as proceeding, so far as it is good for anything, from the
operation of the same practical reason in society which has
given rise to the authorities with which his conviction
brings him into collision. So regarding it, he will be
respectful of the prejudices which he offends by expressing
it ; careful to eschew support which might be due not to
an appreciation of what is good in the new conviction, but
to mere aversion from the check put upon self-will by the
authorities impugned ; patient of opposition, and, in case
of failure, ready to admit that there is more wisdom than
he understood in the conventions which have been too
strong for him.
CHAPTER III
THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF A HEDONISTIC MORAL
PHILOSOPHY
329. The chief theory of conduct which in Modern
Europe has afforded the conscientious citizen a vantage-
ground for judging of the competing claims on his obedience,
and enabled him to substitute a critical and intelligent for
a blind and unquestioning conformity, has no doubt been
the Utilitarian. What we are now considering, it must be
borne in mind, is the practical value of theories in regard
to the moral ideal, as distinct from the possession of the
character by the ideal itself. It is not to the purpose, there-
fore, to notice the work of religious reformers. It is probable
indeed that every movement of religious reform has origi-
nated in some clearer conception of the ideal of human con-
duct, arrived at by some person or persons ; a conception,
perhaps, towards which many men have been silently work-
ing, but which finally finds in some one individual the
character which can give decisive practical expression to it.
But in the initiation of religious reforms the new theory of t^
the ideal, as a theory, always holds a secondary place. It is
not absent, but it is, so to speak, absorbed in a character —
a character to which the speculative completeness of the
theory is of little interest — and it is this character which
gives the new conception of the ideal its power in the world.
The influence exercised by Utilitarianism, on the other hand,
has been specially the influence of a theory. Whatever the
errors arising from its Hedonistic psychology, no other theory
has been available for the social or political reformer, com-
bining so much truth with such ready applicability. No
other has offered so commanding a point of view from which
to criticise the precepts and institutions presented as authori-
tative. When laws of the Church, or of the State, or of
398 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
^'opinion,' have become antagonistic to each other; when
any of them, again, has been found to conflict with one of
those convictions of tender consciences, or of enthusiasts for
humanity, which are a ' law of opinion ' in the making,
Utilitarianism furnishes a test by which the competing claims
of the different laws, or those of law on one side and in-
dividual conviction on the other, may be put to the test.
330. All persons having a private interest in the main-
tenance of the law or custom which the Utilitarian theory
calls in question ; all who shrink from the trouble of having
to examine established rules of conduct; others who are
rightly persuaded that the service rendered to mankind by
rules that have become sacred is not to be measured by any
account of their usefulness which the most enlightened
observer can make out — these withstand Utilitarian criticism
in the name of principle against expediency. Generally,
however — at any rate when the question is one, not of con^
duct in private relations, but of laws or institutions, or of
political conduct — that view of the right course to take which
pleads ' principle,' as against suggestions said to be founded
on 'expediency,' really only differs from the latter in respect
of the more limited range of consequences which it takes
into account. The ' principle ' alleged has originally derived
its authority from reference to some social good which it has
been found to serve. The ' expediency,' for the sake of which
a departure from the established rule is pressed for, is equally
founded on a conception of social good, but on the con-
ception of a good in which a wider range of persons is con-
templated as partaking.
The ill-repute which attaches to considerations of expe-
diency, so far as it is well founded, is chiefly due to the
fact that, when the question of conduct at issue is one which
the person debating it has a private interest in deciding one
way or the other — when he himself will gain pleasure or avoid
pain by either decision — the admission of expediency as the
ground of decision is apt to give him an excuse for deciding
in his own favour, And, even when this personal bias is not
CH.ni] UTILITARIANISM 399
operative, the man who looks to 'expediency' may be apt to
trust to some limited view of consequences, which is all that
his own vision can command, while if he had 'stuck to prin-
ciple' he would really have been guided by a more complete
view, gathered from the wisdom of ages. Neither of these
mischiefs, however, arises from the Utilitarian principle of
practical judgment, as fairly applied, but from that mis-
application of it by interested or hasty individuals to which
all principles are liable. Nor must it be forgotten that, when
private interest affords a motive for deciding a practical
question in a particular way, 'principle' will sometimes
furnish a more convenient excuse than 'expediency.' Slave-
holders, for instance, have never found any difficulty in
justifying slavery 'on principle.'
331. On the whole there is no doubt that the theory of an
ideal good, consisting in the greatest happiness of the greatest
number, as the end by reference to which the claim of all
laws and powers and rules of action on our obedience is to
be tested, has tended to improve human conduct and char-
acter. This admission may be made quite as readily by
those who consider such conduct and character an end in
itself, as by those who hold that its improvement can only
be measured by reference to an extraneous end, consisting
in the quantity of pleasure produced by it ; perhaps, when
due account has been taken of the difficulty of deciding
whether quantity of pleasure is really increased by ' social
progress,' more readily by the former than by the latter. It
is not indeed to be supposed that the Utilitarian theory, any
more than any other theory of morals, has brought about the
recognition or practice of any virtues that were not recognised
and practised independently of it; or that any one, for being
a theoretic Utilitarian, has been a better man — i. e. one more
habitually governed by desire for human perfection in some
of its forms— than he otherwise would have been. But it ,J
has helped men, acting under the influence of ideals of
conduct and rules of virtuous living, to fill up those ideals
and aipply those rules in a manner beneficial to a wider
400 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bK. IV
range of persons — beneficial to them in the sense of tending
to remove certain obstacles to good living in their favour.
It has not given men a more lively sense of their duty to
others — no theory can do that — but it has led those in whom
that sense has already been awakened to be less partial in
* judging who the 'others' are, to consider all men as the
' others,' and, on the ground of the claim of all men to an
equal chance of 'happiness,' to secure their political and
>promote their social equality. To do this is not indeed
directly to advance the highest living among men, but it is
to remove obstacles to such living, which in the name of
principle and authority have often been maintained.
332. The practical service, however, thus rendered by
Utilitarianism has been independent of its analysis of well-
being or good. It has been by insisting that it is 'the
greatest number' whose highest good is to be taken into
account, not by identifying that highest good with a greatest
nett quantity of pleasure, that it has improved the organisa-
tion of human life. It is thus that it has given a wider and
more impartial range to public spirit, to the desire to do
good. It is thus that it has made men watchful of customary
morality, lest its rules should be conceived in the interest of
some particular class of persons, who — probably without be-
ing fully aware of it — have been concerned in establishing and
maintaining them. It is thus that it has afforded men ground
for enquiring, when laws, ahke pleading the highest authority,
were found to make conflicting claims on their obedience,
whether either claim represented the real good of society, and
which represented the good of the largest body of persons.
Very often this question may be sufficiently answered
without any thorough analysis of what the good of society
consists in, and thus the truth of the answer is independent
of the truth of the theory which measures good by the
quantity of pleasure experienced on the whole. In none
of the great struggles between privileged and unprivileged
classes, through which modern society has passed, would
a man have been helped to a sounder judgment as to the
CH. Ill] UTILITARIANISM 401
part which he should take by a more correct definition of
the good. The essential thing for his right guidance has
been that, whatever might be the definition of good which
he would accept, he should admit the equal title of all men
to it in the same sense ; that account should be taken of
the widest possible range of society that can be brought
into view, and that whatever is deemed good for any class
or individuals in the society should be deemed good for all
its members. In the struggle, for instance, through which
the United States of America lately passed, a conscientious
Virginian^ divided in his mind between allegiance to his
State and allegiance to the Union, could have found no
useful direction in the truest possible analysis of the nature
of ultimate good. The kind of well-being ostensibly served
by the laws of his State for those who had the benefit of the
laws, was not a different kind from that served by the main-
tenance of the Union. The question was whether secession
or maintenance of the Union would promote that well-being
most impartially, and for the widest range of society.
Again, in most cases where a man has to decide how
he may best promote the greatest good of others, it makes
little practical difference in regard to the line of action to be
taken, whether he considers their greatest good to lie in the
possession of a certain character, as an end not a means, or
in the enjoyment of the most pleasure of which they are
capable. No one can convey a good character to another, t
Every one must make his character for himself. All that v
one man can do to make another better is to remove ob^
stacles, and supply conditions favourable to the formation
of a good character. Now, in a general way and up to
a certain point, the line of action directed to this removal
of obstacles and supply of conditions favourable to good-
ness, will also tend to make existence more pleasant for
those whose good is being sought. For instance, healthy
houses and food,, sound elementary education, the removal
of temptations to drink, which are needed in order to supply
conditions favourable to good character, tend also to make
Dd
4<i2 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
life more pleasant on the whole. The question at issue
between Hedonistic Utilitarians and their opponents as to
the nature of ultimate good cannot affect their importance.
333. So far we have seen how a philosophy of morals
may prevent the perplexity of conscience, and consequent
paralysis or misdirection of spiritual energy, arising from a
conflict between authorities which have alike some sacred-
ness for the imagination, or between such an authority and
some unauthorised conviction of the individual; how it may
do this by directing the devotion, hitherto supposed to be
due to certain imponents of duty, explicitly to the end from
reference to which all true authority, without distinction,
must be derived ; how the form of philosophy which in the
modern world has most conspicuously rendered this service
has been the Utilitarian, because it has most definitely an-
nounced the interest of humanity, without distinction of
persons or classes, as the end by reference to which all
claims upon obedience are ultimately to be measured. We
may pay this homage to Utilitarianism without admitting
that Hedonistic interpretation of the interest of humanity
which has in fact generally been adopted by Utilitarians,
especially by those who count themselves scientific. Im-
- partiality of reference to human well-being has been the
great lesson which the Utilitarian has had to teach. That
'unscientific' interpretation of well-being which the men
most receptive of the lesson, on the strength of their own
unselfish wishes and aspirations, halve been ready to supply,
has made them practically independent of any further ana-
lysis of it, when once the equality of claim to it had been
thoroughly recognised. We may give Utilitarianism, there-
fore, full credit for the work it has done in rationalising the
order of social and political life, while holding at the same
time that its Hedonistic interpretation of well-being, if logic-
ally carried out, would deprive it of any practical influence
for good ; and that, as this interpretation in a speculative
age comes to be more dwelt upon by the individual, it may
itself induce practical evils, from which deliverance must be
CH. Ill] UTILITARIANISM 403
sought in a truer analysis of the ultimate good for man. It
remains for us then to consider, whether there is any prac-
tical service — any service in the way of a direction of con-
duct— to be rendered in particular by such a theory of the
good, of the moral ideal, as has been set forth above in op-
position to the Hedonistic view. Are there any questions in
regard to the right line to be taken in life, upon which men
are liable to bona fide perplexity', and upon which this theory
might offer a guidance that Utilitarianism, as a theory, could
not supply? And, again, can it claim any useful office,
simply in virtue of its being a philosophy of morals more
adequate to the moral capability of man, as a counteracting
influence to that weakening of conduct and lowering of aims,
which in a speculative age a less adequate, and therefore
misleading, philosophy may bring about ?
334. Hitherto the practical effects of Utilitarianism, as
a generally accepted theory, have been chiefly seen in its
application to public policy rather than to private conduct.
It has been the question, Ought such and such laws or
institutions to be maintained or altered? rather than the
question, Ought I to do this or that? which it has in fact
generally been employed to settle. Philosophic Utilitarians,^
of course, have always held that the ultimate criterion of
right and wrong in the actions of individuals, as much as
in laws and institutions, is to be sought in the balance of
resulting pleasure or pain, but they have not generally been
forward to press the application of this criterion by individuals
to their own actions. They have seldom, indeed, taken the
same line as Mr. Henry Sidgwick, who, while he holds that
no other scientific test of right conduct is possible than that
derived from calculating the quantity of pleasure produced
by any course of action to all sentient beings capable of
being affected by it, yet explicitly rejects the doctrine that
pleasure is the sole object of desire ; and who, even when
he has thus cleared the Utilitarian motive from the liability
' ' Bona fide perplexity,' as having its origin really in intellectual
difficulties, not in any selfish interest.
D d 2
404 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
to be identified with the pleasure of the person moved by it,
still admits that the moral sentiments are in fact independent
of it, and expressly guards himself against being supposed
to mean that the desire of producing the utmost possible
pleasure is the only right or best motive of action *. Such
Utilitarianism has more of Butler and Hutcheson in it than
of Bentham and Mill. But there are probably few even
among the more strictly Hedonistic Utilitarians who hold
that our ordinary judgments of actions, as right or wrong,
are formed upon any estimate by the individual of the efifects
of the actions in the way of producing pleasure or pain, or
- who would wish them to be so formed. Even when, as is
commonly the case, they retain the psychological doctrine
that pleasure — which must mean pleasure to oneself — is the
sole object of desire, pain the sole object of aversion, they
would deny that in his best actions the individual was actually
influenced by what we naturally describe as interested mo-
tives, or by a calculation of pleasure-yielding consequences,
They would admit that such actions are done from interest
in others, or from a feeling that they ought to be done; and
they would reconcile this admission with- their doctrine as
to pleasure being the sole object of desire, by supposing that
it is aversion from some specific pain of shame, desire for
some specific pleasure in doing nobly or in contemplating
the pleasure of others — by whatever process of evolution
these sensibilities may have arisen — that form the motives to
such actions. And, just as they would thus qualify their view
of the kind of desire for pleasure which is the motive to an
admirable action, so they would admit that in most cases
the question, whether an action was right or wrong, was most
likely to be correctly decided by the individual on the
strength of judgments which we call intuitive, which may
perhaps represent prolonged observation by his ancestors of
the pleasure-giving and pain-giving effects of actions, but are
independent of any such observation on his own part.
335. It is not to be expected, however, in an age of
' Methods of Ethics, Bk. I. Chap, iv, and Bk. IV. Chap. i.
CH. Ill] UTILITARIANISM 405
intellectual emancipation, when a scientific test of right
action has been announced which is in itself easily intelli-
gible (whatever upon thorough enquiry may turn out to be
the diflficulties of its application), that educated men will
fail to employ it in their judgments of what they individu-
ally should do and should not do. Having got to the
water, the ducklings will swim. The habit of calling autho-
rities in question cannot be limited to philosophers; and,
having once learned to call them in question, men will not
stop, short with the authorities that have regulated their
civil and political relations. They will seek a rationale of
their most intimate moral obligations ; and when the Utili-
tarian philosopher offers them a scientific test of right and
wrong, they will not be slow to apply it to the question
which interests them most — the question how they may
best conduct their own lives. In the European nations
a constantly increasing number of persons find themselves
in circumstances, in which a large option is allowed them
as to the plan on which they will conduct their lives. The
necessities of providing for a family, or of fulfilling the
requirements of some employment without which they could
not live, no longer determine the whole course of their exist-
ence. They can 'please themselves' in regard to a large
part of their action; and they are naturally interested in find-
ing a theory which, though it will probably have much less
influence than they ascribe to it in really directing even their
more optional conduct, will always give them a basis for
arguing with themselves and others, whether that conduct is
justifiable or otherwise.
How prevalent such argument has become, at least in
' cultivated circles,' need not be said. Hedonism has become
not only a serious topic in the study, but often the babble
of the drawing-room. Good people, of the sort who fifty
years ago would have found in the law of their neighbours'
opinion, or in the requirements of their church or sect, or
in the precepts of Scripture as interpreted by church or sect,
sufficient direction for so much of their walk and conduct
4o6 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bK.IV
as it would have occurred to them to think in need of any
direction, may now be heard arguing whether this occupation
or that, this or that habit of action, this or that way of spend-
ing their time, conveys .the greater amount of pleasure and
is therefore the more to be approved. That they attach
serious importance to the question, that they suppose its
decision to go for a great deal in the actual guidance of
their lives, may be inferred from the surprise and displeasure
with which they would receive a suggestion that, after all,
their action is pretty much independent of it. They may not
be very clear whether it is pleasure to themselves or to
others that they have in view ; they may not have appreciated
the distinction between ' egoistic ' and ' universalistic ' He-
donism ; but there can be no doubt of two things : (i) that
to an extent unknown in previous generations they are seek-
ing a theoretical direction for individual conduct, and seeking
it in a consideration of the natural consequences of conduct,
as causing pleasure or pain ; and (2) that they seem to them-
selves to be largely influenced in conduct by this theoretical
direction.
336. Those who are glad of atopic for denunciation may,
if they like, treat the prevalence of such opinions among
educated men as encouraging the tendency to vicious self-
indulgence in practice. No such unfairness vs'ill here be
committed. There is no good reason to apprehend that
there is relatively more — we may even hope that there is
less — of such self-indulgence than in previous generations ;
though, for reasons just indicated, it has a wider scope for
itself, talks more of itself and is more talked about, than at
times when men were more tied down by the necessities of
their position. We are no more justified in treating what
we take to be untrue theories of morals as positive pro-
moters of vice, than in treating what we deem truer theories
as positive promoters of virtue. Only those in whom the
tendencies to vicious self-indulgence have been so far over-
come as to allow the aspiration after perfection of life to
take effect, are in a state to be affected either for better or
CH. Ill] HEDONISM 407
for worse by theories of the good. The worst that can truly
be objected against the prevalence of Hedonistic theory, just
noticed, is that it may retard and mislead those who are
already good, according to the ordinary sense of goodness as
equivalent to immunity from vice, in their effort to be better ;
and the most that can be claimed for the theory which we
deem truer, is that it keeps the way clearer of speculative
impediments to the operation of motives, which it seeks to in-
terpret but does not pretend to supply. The grounds for this
objection and this claim are what we have now to consider.
337. We have already explained the reasons to which we
ascribe the general acceptance of Hedonistic theory by
persons who are themselves by no means habitual pleasure-
seekers. They seem to be chiefly two. One is the confused
notion that the pleasure incidental to the satisfaction of
desire, or to the consciousness of work done, is itself the
object of the desire, or the end to which the work is directed.
Simply for want of thorough reflective analysis, men whose
main interest is in the achievement of objects quite different
from any enjoyment of pleasure, are ready to admit that
their object is always some pleasure or other, because they
are conscious of always anticipating pleasure in the achieve-
ment of their objects. The other reason is the impossibility
of adequately defining an end that consists in the realisation
of human capabilities, until the realisation is accomplished.
When we say that the ' summum bonum,' by reference to
which the value of men's actions is to be measured, is the
perfection of human life, as consisting in the full realisation
of human capabilities, some more detailed account of this
realisation, and of the perfection which it constitutes, is
naturally asked for. Eut such an account cannot be given
in a way that is likely at first to satisfy the questioner. We
can point indeed to a great realisation of human capabilities,
which has actually been achieved. Men have been in large
measure civilised and moralised; nature has been largely
subdued to their use ; they have learnt to express them-
selves in the fine arts. The ordinary activity of men.
4o8 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
regulated by law and custom, has its value as contributing
to this realisation. But it is not for this ordinary activity, so
regulated, that those who are seeking practical direction in
a theory of the good need any guidance. It does not occur
to them that they have any option in regard to it. They
play their part in it as a matter of course. It is an aspiration
after some further perfection than that already attained in
those actual arrangements of life, which they have no choice
but to accept and help to maintain, that makes them
enquire into the ends of living. If the philosopher can
only tell them to try to be better and to make others better ;
to seek a more complete fulfilment of the capabilities of
human nature in themselves and in others ; to make this the
object of their lives and the end by reference to which they
measure the value of actions ; if he cannot at the same time
tell them what this greater perfection will positively mean for
themselves and others ; they will be apt to think that he has
told them nothing, and to contrast the emptiness of the end
to which he professes to direct them, with the definite intelli-
gibility of that which is explained to consist in a greatest pos-
sible quantity of pleasure for all sentient beings. For does
not every one know what pleasure is and desire it, and cannot
every one compare a greater with a less quantity of it ?
338. For the moment we will suppose this contrast
between the two ways of conceiving the chief good — between
the definiteness of the one and the vagueness of the other —
to be valid, as it is, no doubt, generally accepted. We will
suppose the view that the ' summum bonum ' is the greatest
possible nett quantity of pleasure to be adopted by some one,
who has no inducement to find in it excuses for self-indul-
gence of that kind which, as we have seen, though it may find
excuses for itself in theoretical Hedonism, is never really
occasioned by it. We will suppose it to be disinterestedly
applied by such an one to the direction of his life, in those
respects in which he is likely to feel the need of direction.
We have previously explained the grounds on which, as
a matter of speculation, we jeject this view, and need not
CH. Ill] HEDONISM
409
here repeat them. The question now to be discussed is
whether it is likely to have any effects which may make
a reconsideration of it, and a more thorough insight into the
truth of the view opposed to it, practically desirable. Is not
its intrinsic unavailability for supplying motive or guidance
to a man who wishes to make his life better, likely to induce
a practical scepticism in reflecting persons who have adopted
it, which tends to paralyse the effort after a better life ?
To speak of it as thus intrinsically unavailable is a state-
ment which will probably be thought to need prompt
vindication. It will be remembered that we are supposing
a man to be in search of some guidance of conduct which
mere conformity to established usage, and the fulfilment of
the duties of his station according to what is expected of him,
will not afford. As regards duties recognised by the law of
opinion — those of common veracity and fair dealing, and of
beneficence in its more obvious forms, family duties and
those imposed by State or Church — it is easy to show that
an overbalance of pain would on the whole result from their
neglect to those capable of being affected by it, whether or
no we consider this to constitute the reason why they should
be fulfilled. We cannot doubt that a general desire to avoid
pain has had much to do with the establishment of such
duties, though we may think that alone it could not suffice
for their establishment. And it is certain that any disturb-
ance of the established order, simply as disturbance, must
cause much pain. On the other hand, there is no consider-
able balance of pleasure to one who violates such duties, or
to other exceptional persons to whom his act may be an
occasion of pleasure, to be set against the general pain caused
by it. From the nature of the case the pangs of fear and
shame must go far to neutralise any access of pleasure to
such persons. In such cases, therefore, if the test of felicific
consequences is to be applied, there is no doubt as to the
result that it will yield. But then these are not the cases in
which the application of such a test is ever likely to be called
for. It is for direction in cases where the rules of conven-
410 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
tional morality fail them, or in the attempt to remedy the
defects of that morality, that enlightened and conscientious
persons look to their theory of the good. A man wishes to
satisfy himself, for instance, whether he is justified in spend-
ing so much of his time, without neglect of any recognised
duty, in the gratification of his taste for music, or of his
curiosity in literature ; in conforming to the expectation of
his class by accepting a challenge to a duel, or by running
race-horses, or by being a party to the purchase of votes at
an election j whether he ought not, in consideration of the
state of society, to give up his habit of moderate drinking,
or apply less of his wealth to private enjoyments and more
to public purposes. Or perhaps he finds himself in some
situation, such as that which we illustrated from the ' Heart
of Midlothian,' in which, for the sake of others as well as
himself, there seems to be strong reason for departing from
some ordinary rule of morality, and in which, having eman-
cipated himself from those influences of imagination which
might govern the conduct of less enlightened persons, he
requires some rule of reason to direct him. When the
problem is of this kind, how far will the Hedonistic theory
really help to its solution ?
339. In the first order of instances just suggested, the
question before the individual, speaking generally, is whether
he should depart from the course of action to which custom
or inclination, or the sense of what the opinion of his class
requires of him, would naturally lead him, with a view to
some higher good ; and this, on the principles of Hedonistic
Utilitarianism, must mean, with a view to the production
of a quantity of pleasure greater on the whole than that to
be expected from the course of action which, but for the
sake of this higher good, he would naturally follow. We
will suppose the Hedonistic calculation, then, to be under-
taken by an enlightened and dispassionate person in order
to the settlement of this question. How is he to assure
himself that the proposed immediate and undoubted sacrifice
on his own part will be compensated by an addition to the .
CH. in] HEDONISM
411
sum of human enjoyments on the whole ? We say human
enjoyments, in order not to complicate the question at the
outset by recognising the necessity of taking the pleasures
of all sentient beings into account, though it is difficult to
see how upon Hedonistic principles • that necessity can be
ignored ; for if it is pleasure, as such, and not the person
enjoying it, that has intrinsic value, all pleasures alike, by
whatever beings enjoyed, must be considered in making up
the main account. Though confining his view, however,
to the pains and pleasures of men, our enquirer, if he
refuses to be put off with answers which really imply non-
Hedonistic suppositions, will find it difficult to assure
himself that, by any interference with usage or resistance
to his own inclination, he can make the balance of human
pleasures as against human pains greater than it is.
340. And in the process of dealing with this difficulty
he is likely to find himself in the presence of one still more
formidable, because more closely affecting the springs of
his own conduct. He will have to face the question
whether, upon the principles which have generally been
taken as the foundation of philosophic Utilitarianism, the
supposition that it is possible for him to do anything else
than follow his pleasure-seeking impulses can be other than
an illusion. In the first place he will be likely to call in
question the common assumption that the aggregate of
pleasures at any time enjoyed might, under the circumstances,
be greater than it is. He will see that this assumption
conflicts with the principles on which 'the proof of Utili-
tarianism ' has been generally founded. These principles
are that every one acts from what is for the time his
strongest desire or aversion, and that the object of a man's
strongest desire is always that which for the time he
imagines as his greatest pleasure, the object of his strongest
aversion that which for the time he imagines as his greatest
pain. Now we have clearly no title to say that any one is
mistaken in such imagination ; that anything else would be a
greater pleasure or pain to him at the time than that which,
412 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
being what he is and under the given circumstances, he looks
forward to as a greatest pleasure or pain. Of his present
capacity for pleasure we have, on the hypothesis, no test
but his desire, and of his desire no test but his action.
It will be objected, perhaps, that a man is really capable
of other pleasure than that which at any time he imagines
as his greatest and consequently desires, since his imagina-
tion of pleasure is founded on past experience of pleasure,
and this is not the measure of what he is capable of
receiving. Now of course the pleasure which has been is
not exactly that which shall be. A more intense pleasure
may from time to time come in a man's way than any he
has before experienced ; and this may affect his imagination,
and consequent desire, of pleasure for the future. But it
does not follow from this that any one at any given time,
possessed by imagination of a particular pleasure and by
desire for it, is capable of any other pleasure than that.
He may come to be so capable, but for the present he is
not. The pleasure may turn out to be much less in enjoy-
ment than in imagination ; it may in the sequel lead to the
most intense pain ; but it remains true that for the time, if
it is the pleasure which the man imagines as then for him
the greatest, and which by inevitable consequence (on the
given hypothesis) he most strongly desires, it is in fact
the greatest pleasure of which he is capable. And, mutatis
mutandis, the same will be true of pain. Our enquirer then
will conclude that, supposing his principles to be true, the
aggregate balance of pleasures at any time enjoyed by man-
kind is as great as it is possible for it to be, the persons and
the circumstances being what they are ; and that, since in
each of his actions .a man obtains the greatest pleasure or
avoids the greatest pain which is at the time possible for
him, there is no ground for saying that in the total result
he obtains a less sum of pleasure than any which it was
really possible for him to obtain, except through some good
fortune independent of his own action.
341. This conclusion must at least suggest a reconsidera-
CH. m] HEDONISM 413
tion of the sense in which it is commonly said that such or
such an action ought or ought not to be done. The Utili-
tarian who does not probe his Hedonistic principles to the
bottom, has no difficulty in saying of any one that he ought
to do what he does not, because, while he takes for granted
that the largest balance of possible pleasure is the chief
good, he does not question that it is open to the man who
'does what he ought not' to obtain a larger quantity of
pleasure for himself and for others than he in fact obtains
by acting as he does. But upon Hedonistic principles, as
we have just seen, it is clearly not possible for a man, as his
desires and aversions at any time stand, to obtain at the
time by his own act more pleasure, or avoid more pain,
than he in fact does. We cannot therefore, consistently
with these principles, tell the man whom we count vicious
that, according to the common Utilitarian language, he wil-
fully disregards his own true interest and throws away his
own greatest happiness. At the most we can only tell him
that more pleasure on the whole would have resulted from
another course of action than that to which an inevitable
strongest desire for pleasures, from time to time imagined
as the greatest, has in fact led him. But even this, when
the matter is looked into, will not seem so certain. It is
not to be denied, of course, that if some instrument could
be invented, by which the degrees of intensity of successive
pleasures and pains could be registered, and then the sum
added up, in many cases where a man had led an immoral
life the balance would be found much less on the side of
pleasure, or much more on the side of pain, than would
have resulted had the man led a different life ; though on
each occasion, according to the Hedonistic hypothesis, he
must have obtained the most pleasure of which for the time
he was capable. This is plainly the case where the man's
actions have made his life much shorter, or much more pain-
ful in its later period, than it would have been had he acted
differently. But here everything must depend on the nature
of the individual case. For a man with a very strong con-
414 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk.IV
stitution a certain course of action will have a different bear-
ing on his future capacity for enjoyment from that which it
has for a weaker man. On the other hand, if a man has
some germ of disease in his system which must kill him
before he is old, the method of seeking a rapid succession
of intense pleasures, without reference to the effects they
may have in later life, will be the right one for him to adopt
with a view to enjoying the largest sum possible for him on
the whole, while it would be the wrong one for a man who,
with care, was sure to live to old age.
342. Even in regard to modes of living, then, which at
first sight seem certain to yield a man more pain and
less pleasure on the whole than he might have had, if he
could have lived differently, we shall find that we have to
make an indefinite number of exceptions. Even in regard
to them, so far as the goodness or badness of a particular
course of action is to depend on its relation to the nett sum
of pleasure possible for the individual so acting, we shall
have to say that it may be good for one and bad for another,
according to physical conditions which we are not com-
petent to ascertain. In other cases where, looking on from
the outside, we are apt to think that the enjoyment of cer-
tain pleasures, the most intense of which the individual is
for the time capable, diminishes the whole sum possible for
him, we are arguing from our own conditions and suscepti-
bilities. We argue that the enjoyment of certain pleasures
brings a preponderance of pain in the long run, because it
brings poverty or dishonour or the pangs of conscience, or
deprives a man of the pleasures of friendship or family
affection or a cultivated taste. But, as to these pleasures
which we suppose to be forgone, we have no means of
measuring their intensity, as enjoyed by one man, against
the intensity of pleasures which we count vicious, as enjoyed
by another man. We cannot tell to what degree they would
have been pleasures to the man whom we suppose to have
deprived himself of them. As to the pains, again, which
we suppose the immoral man to incur, their incidence de-
CH. Ill] HEDONISM 415
pends largely on his position, the length of his purse, and
a multitude of circumstances which vary with the individual
case. We are not entitled to hold that, if incurred at all,
they are to him what they would be to a man who had lived
differently. The very pursuit of pleasures of sense may so
dull the moral sensibilities that the pain, which an onlooker
associates with those pleasures as their natural consequence,
does not really follow for the person who has enjoyed them.
It would thus seem that, though there are doubtless many
men who by their manner of life make the balance of
pleasures and pains, number and duration being duly set
against intensity, less favourable to themselves than it might
have been if they could have lived differently, yet we cannot
with certainty tell any particular person that he is living
Such a life, and are not entitled to identify those in whose
case the balance will turn out favourable with those whom
we in fact count virtuous, nor those in whose case it will
turn out unfavourable with those whom we count vicious.
343. It may be objected here perhaps that, although we
cannot say with certainty of any particular course of action,
as pursued by a particular person, that it diminishes the
sum of pleasures open to him, we may be quite sure that
action of that kind has a general tendency to diminish plea-
sure for the persons pursuing it. Does this mean, however,
that the supposed course of action would diminish the sura
of pleasures if generally pursued, or that it does so for the
majority of those who pursue it ? The former meaning is
not to the purpose, when we are considering the question
whether the hves actually lived by men bring them less
pleasure on the whole than the same men would experience
if they lived differently. Supposing a moral obligation upon
the individual to act according to general rules, it will of
course be his duty to consider whether any course of action
which, as adopted by himself, is productive of a prepon^
derance of pleasure, would have a like result if generally
adopted. But no such consideration can affect the questioti
whether the line of action, actually pursued by this man or
4l6 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bK. IV
that, is consistent with the attainment by those persons of
the maximum of pleasure possible for them. On this ques-
tion the fact that the same line of action, if pursued by
other people than those who do in fact pursue it, would
diminish the balance of pleasure possible for those other
people, has simply no bearing at all. In this regard each
particular action or course of action must stand upon its
own merits. If the morality of the action— the question
whether it is morally good or bad — depends on the balance
of pleasure or pain that will result from it — not from appa^
rently similar actions done by other men, but from that
particular action as done by the person who does it, and
under the circumstances under which it is done ; and if we
cannot be sure that the particular action diminishes the
balance of pleasures which, given the circumstances of the
case and the desires and aversions of the agent, was really
possible, as little can we be sure whether that particular
action is morally good or bad, whether it should be done or
should not be done.
344. It may be objected, however, that this uncertainty
can only continue, so long as we confine our consideration
to the consequences of the particular action to the agent
himself; that it must disappear when we take into account
its consequences to society in general, as on Utilitarian
principles we are bound to do. But is this so? It must
be remembered that we are supposing the principles of
Hedonistic Utilitarianism tp be strictly carried out. Accord-
ing to them ultimate value„ lies in pleasures as such, not in
the persons enjoying them. A pleasure of a certain intensity,
enjoyed by three persons, is of no more value than a pleasure
of threefold intensity enjoyed by one. It must be remem-
bered also that the question relates to the pleasure-giving
effects of particular actions, not of kinds of action. Now
actions are no doubt sometimes done, in regard to which it
would be idle to doubt ths^t the pain, or loss of pleasure,
which they cause to others far outweigh? any pleasure, or
irelief from pain, which they bring to those concerned in
CH. Ill] HEDONISM 417
doing thiem. But is this the case with the every-day actions
which men of a high moral standard would condemn, and
to which the moral reformer would seek to put an end ? Is
it really possible to measure the addition to the pleasure
of others, or diminution of their pains, that would be caused
by the agent's abstaining from any such an act — which, on
the hypothesis, yields him the most intense pleasure of which
for the time he is capable, or it would not be done — against
the loss of pleasure which he would thereby undergo ? The
loss of pleasure would vary indefinitely with different persons;
it would be different in the same person at different times,
according to the degree of that susceptibility upon which the
intensity of the pleasure which is for the time most intense
for the individual depends. How can we be sure that, in all
or in most cases where such actions are done, the certain
loss of pleasure or increase of pain to each individual, which,
taking him as he is on occasion of each action, would be
implied in his acting otherwise than he does, would be so
overbalanced by increase of pleasure or decrease of pain to
others, that the total sum of pleasure enjoyed by the aggre-
gate of men, taking them as they are, would be greater than
it is?
345. If our supposed Hedonistic enquirer follows out
these considerations to their legitimate conclusion, they are
likely at least to have a modifying influence on any zeal which
may have possessed him for reforming current morality in
himself and others. . They will at least make him less con-
fident in judging that men, as they are, should act otherwise
than they do, less confident in any methods of increasing
the enjoyments of mankind, and in consequence more ready
to let things take their course. ' But after all,' it may be
said, ' this may mean no more than that they will make him
less censorious, more patient of the failings of mankind,
more alive to the slowness of the process by which alone
any amelioration of the human lot can be achieved. The
conclusion supposed to be arrived at amounts to no more
than this, that, if we would increase the sum of enjoyments
E e
4l8 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bK. IV
at any time open to men, we must first change their desires
and their surrotindings. The enquirer who is in doubt
whether or no he should interfere with some custom, or
resist some incHnation of his own, with a view to increasing
human enjoyments, may admit that by so doing he cannot
make the balance of pleasure greater than it at any time
happens to be, so long as men and circumstances remain
what at the time they are; but he may hope that his personal
sacrifice^ his disturbance (necessarily painful in itself) of
mischievous class conventions, will so alter men and cir-
cumstances as to make the balance of enjoyments greater
in the future than it at present is. This hope should be
enough to induce any one^who does not need to be attracted
by the glory of present recognised success, " to spurn de-
lights and live laborious days." '
, Now it is quite true that there is nothing in his acceptance
of the supposed principles, however logically he applies them,
to prevent our enquirer, if he is of sanguine temper, from
hoping for an increase in the nett sum of human enjoyments.
The question is whether they warrant him in believing that
by any self-denial or reforming energy on his part the result
can be affected. The ' vulgar ' Utilitarian notion, of course,
is that it is men's own fault that they are not happier on the
whole than they are ; that it is open to them by their own
action to increase the sum of their enjoyments ; that they
ought to do so ; that every one is responsible for contributing
as much as he can, according to his lights and powers, to
the stock of human happiness. But our enquirer, following
out the principles of philosophical Utilitarianism, will be apt
to doubt the justification of this belief, whatever he may think
of its origin and serviceableness. ' The course of a man's
action,' he will say, 'depends on the pleasures and pains
that have happened to come in his way, through a chain of
events over which he has had no control. These determine
his desires and aversions, which in turn determine his actions
and through them to some extent the pleasures and pains of
his future. No initiative by the individual anywhere occurs.
CH. in] HEDONISM 419
Desires indeed may arise in a man which he has not felt
before, and may lead to action which increases the stock of
human enjoyment ; but they can only arise because some
pleasures have fallen to his lot that he had not experienced
before. Clearly then there is no alternative but to let the
world have its way, and my own inclinations have their way.
I may indulge the hope that the result will be some diminu-
tion of the misery of mankind. There may be observable
tendencies which encourage this hope. New pleasures may
arise for men in the natural course of events, which will so
modify their action as in the future to yield more pleasure
on the whole than they have had in the past. The inclina-
tions which I find in myself, and which arise from pleasures
that I have experienced, may contribute to this result. It
may turn out that I have a taste which renders me a medium
of increased pleasure to mankind. But, whether it prove so
or no, that I should follow my tastes and inclinations is the
only possibility.'
346. There is no ground for surmising that any so distinct
conclusion is consciously arrived at even by the most
thorough-going speculative Hedonists, except under the
influence of self-indulgent habits which are quite indepen-
dent of their theories, and may be common to them with men
who in theory are 'Ascetics.' But if it is the logical issue
of their theory, though a real consciousness of duty, which
the theory fails to interpret, may prevent its distinct avowal
even in the most secret dialogue of the soul with itself, it
can scarcely fail to weaken their actual initiative in good
works. In a man of strong speculative interest a suspicion
that his theory does not justify his practice cannot go for
nothing. Now that the above conclusion is the logical issue
of the Hedonistic theory is what no one, aware of the extent
to which that theory is adopted, and superior to the tempta-
tion of scoring a dialectical victory, would wish to make out
if he could help it. But how is the conclusion to be avoided?
If men at any given time are getting as much pleasure as
under the conditions is possible for them — and that this is
E e 2
420 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. rv
the case seems the necessary inference from the Hedonistic
principles stated — the only way of increasing the sum will be
by altering their possibilities of pleasure ; by changing the
conditions in the way of imagination and desire, which
determine the greatest sum of pleasure possible for men as
they are, in such a way that a larger sum shall be possible
for them in the future. The Hedonist may hope that such
an alteration will come about, either through some benefit
cence of nature, or through the effort of every man to compass
means of attaining the pleasures which he most desires and
avoiding the pains which he most dislikes. But how, accord--
ing to his doctrine, should any one try to change the course
of life to which habit and inclination lead him, in order to
produce such an alteration ? Such an attempt would imply
that an alteration of what pleases or pains him most can be
an object to a man, to whom yet, upon the hypothesis, desire
for the pleasure which most attracts him, aversion from the
pain which most repels him in imagination, is the only
possible motive ; and is not this a contradiction ?
347. If the speculative Hedonist, then, anxious about his
duty in the world, once comes to put to himself the question,
why he should trouble himself about a duty in the world at
all, it would seem that he can logically answer the question
in only one way ; however inconsistent the answer may be
with the fact that he cannot help asking the question. He
must conclude that he has no duty in the world, according
to the sense in which he naturally uses the word— no duty
other than a necessity of following the inclination for that
which from time to time presents itself to him as his greatest
pleasure, or the aversion from what presents itself as his greatest
pain. He must explain the seeming consciousness of duty
as best he can, by supposition of its arising from antagonism
between aversion from some apprehended pain of punish-
ment or shame, and inclination to some anticipated pleasure.
As the vulgar understand the phrases ' should do ' or ' ought
to do ' — as he himself understands them in his unphiloso-r
phical moments — he must count it absurd to say that any-
CH. Ill] HEDONISM ^21
thing ought to be done by himself or any one else, which is
not done ; absurd, that is, if it is taken to imply that any one
has any real option of acting otherwise than as, under im-
agination of a greatest pleasure or a greatest pain, he in fact
does act, or that there is a happiness actually open to men
as they are, which by their own fault they throw away. The
whole phraseology of obligation, in short, upon Hedonistic
principles can best be explained by a theory which is
essentially the same as that of Hobbes, and which in Plato's
time was represented by the dictum of certain Sophists that
' Justice is the interest of the stronger.' A few words will
explain the form in which such a theory would naturally
present itself to one who made the legitimate deductions
from the principles in question.
348. The contemplation of certain actions by the indi-
vidual, as actions which he ought to do, implies at once
that they can be done, and that they are such as the
individual, if left to his natural desire for pleasure and
aversion from pain, would not do. But, upon Hedonistic
principles, except through some desire for pleasure or aver-
sion from pain they could not be done. The distinction of
them, then, must lie in the kind of pleasure or pain which
the individual contemplates as his inducement to do them.
It must be a pleasure or pain which he looks for from the
agency of others, who have power to reward or punish him
— to reward or punish him, if with nothing else, yet with an
approval or disapproval to which he is so sensitive that the
approval may in his imagination outweigh every other
pleasure, the disapproval every other pain. Thus the con-
sciousness ' I ought to do this or that ' must be interpreted
as equivalent to the consciousness that it is expected of me
by others, who are ' stronger ' than I am in the sense that
they have power to reward or punish me — whether these
* others ' are represented by the civil magistrate or by some
public opinion, whether the rewards and punishments pro-
ceeding from them are in the nature of what we call physical,
or what we call mental, pleasure and pain. It is their
422 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
interest which is the ultimate foundation of the judgment,
on the part of the individual, that he ought or ought not.
This judgment only represents the interest of the individual,
in so far as that which he presents to himself as his greatest
pleasure or pain has come to depend upon his forecast of
the will or sentiment of the others, who are stronger than he.
The better and worse feXS!-, or simply, being equivalent to
the greater pleasure and greater pain simply, the morally
better and worse are the greater pleasure and pain of those
who have power to reward and punish, and who through
that power are able so to affect the imagination of individuals
as to make it seem a greatest pleasure to please them<
a greatest pain to displease them. So far as in any society
this power rests, directly or indirectly, with the majority, the
morally better for any member of that society will be the
greater pleasure of the greater number ; not however because
that greater number is the greater number, but because it
possesses the power described. The action of the individual
will be morally good, according as the greater pleasure of
the individual — which is his only possible motive — corre-
sponds with the greater pleasure of the stronger, in the sense
explained, and thus leads him to do what is expected of him
by the stronger. He is counted a good man when this is
habitually the case with him. His conscience is that sym-
pathy with the feeling of the stronger, in virtue of which an
action that would displease the stronger, and therefore be
morally bad, becomes painful to him on the contemplation.
An action which a man does 'from sense of duty,' irre-
spectively, as it seems, of anticipated pleasure or pain, really
represents a sympathetic sense of what is expected of him,
which makes the contemplated pain of not doing it outweigh
any pleasure to be gained by a contrary course. Perhaps he
has no definite notion of any particular persons who expect
it of him , perhaps there are no such persons ; but his
feeling about it is the result of a like feeling on the part of
his ancestors, which, as felt by them, was directed to some
definite source of hope or fear. Between fear of the sword
CH. Ill] HEDONISM 423
or stick, and the sort of conscience which is said neither to
fear punishment nor hope for reward, the gap seems wide,
but it may not perhaps be too wide for evolution and here^
ditary transmission to fill.
349. Some such account of the ' phenomena of morality '
seems the most logical which, upon Hedonistic principles,
can be arrived at. If we admit that the only possible motive
to action is desire for some pleasure or aversion from some
pain, it offers the most consistent method of explaining that
which all must admit to be the distinguishing thing in
morality — the appearance, namely, of there being another
standard of value than pleasure, of there being actions that
proceed from another motive than desire for pleasure. If
the question is asked, how" that which is said to be the moral
good and criterion, viz. the greatest nett sum of pleasures
for the greatest number, can be a good or object of desire to
the individual, who on the hypothesis can only desire his
own pleasure, it may be replied that we are not called upon
to consider it such an object of desire to him at all. On
the contrary, in calling an action morally good we imply some
element of repugnance to the desire of the person for whom
it is morally good. It is not good as satisfying any natural
desire for pleasure on his part, i. e. any such desire as he
would have if left to himself. It is as causing pleasure to
others, not to him, that it has come to be reckoned good.
His interest in doing it is merely the result of the relation in
which the action stands to others, as a source of pleasure to
them and therefore approved by them. He does it as a
means of gaining the pleasure of their approval, or of avoiding
the pain of punishment or shame— the pleasure and pain to
which for the time he happens to be most sensitive.
Again, upon this theory, we are saved the embarrassment
of having to explain how, if the individual always chooses
what pleases him best, he can miss a moral good which
consists in or implies the greatest sum of pleasure possible
for him. According to it. that which is morally best for
the individual is not /5« greatest pleasure, but the greatest
424 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
pleasure for those who can reward and punish him ; who can
make their approval and disapproval objects of his desire
and aversion. Thus, though he always chooses the greatest
imagined pleasure, the individual's acts may conflict with
the morally best, unless desire for reward or approval,
aversion from punishment or disapproval, keep his action in
constant correspondence with the interest of those who
make morality. There is no need then to attempt any
impossible ' moral arithmetic,' any balance of the extent and
durability of certain pleasures against the intensity of others,
with a view to showing that the immoral man misses the
greatest sum of pleasure possible to him. It is not his
greatest pleasure, but the greatest pleasure of 'the stronger,'
which forms the issue in all questions of morality. No
question need be raised between what ' seems ' good and
what ' is ' good. That which in the long run seems to those
who wield the forces of society most conducive to their
pleasure, is really so, and the strongest force in society tends
to become equivalent, directly or indirectly, to that of the
majority : so that a man's duty — that which he ' ought to
do,' or which he feels is expected of him — tends to be that
sort of action which conduces to the greatest happiness of
the greatest number. But as there is no fixedness or finality
either in the ruling influence of society, or in the modes of
action which those who exercise this influence find most for
their pleasure, no final or absolute judgment can be given
as to the morally better or worse. Within certain limits the
standard of morality fluctuates.
350. So much for the course of speculation which a logical
mind, starting from the principles on which Utilitarianism
has generally been founded, is likely to follow. In order to
illustrate more definitely the weakening of moral initiative
likely to result from it, we will suppose our enquirer, having
been touched by a scruple as to his continuance in some
practice in which, like others of his class, he has indulged,
and which is not condemned either by law or public opinion,
to be examining this scruple in the light of his Hedonistic
CH. Ill] HEDONISM 425
philosophy. Let the enquirer be some one so circumstanced
as was C. J. Fox, and let gambling be the practice in ques-
tion. Let us suppose a dialogue within the soul, excited by
the suggestion that the practice is morally bad and ought to
be given up.
' How can it be morally bad ? I have come to the conclu-
sion that the morally bad means that which conflicts with the
will of the stronger, or, as the Utilitarians say, with a law
enforced by some sanction, either the legal sanction or the
popular sanction; but no such law is broken by the practice
in question.'
'You forget the other sanctions, the religious and the
natural.'
' If I forget the religious sanction, this shows that to me
it is not a sanction. It is a purely subjective sanction, con-
sisting in fear of the pains of another world. As a matter
of fact, I do not find any ostensibly divine prohibition of
gambling, sanctioned by the threat of such pains ; but, if
I did, it would not affect me, for it cannot be proved that
such pains will ever be endured, and I do not happen to be
afraid of them.'
'But the natural sanction? In gambling you are violating
a law enforced by a natural sanction, as you will find when
the painful consequences of your gambling propensities in
due course of nature come to be felt.'
' Here at any rate we are shifting our ground. The first
suggestion was that the practice was tnorally bad, and it
would not be so if it were contrary to a law enforced by
natural sanctions ; if, in the natural course of things and
without the intervention of any social force, it led to an over-
balance of pain. But how can it be shown that in gambling
I violate a law enforced by a natural sanction ? There is no
doubt about the intense pleasure I find in gambling, as
measured, according to our principles, by my intense desire
to gamble. The pleasures that I am supposed to forgo by
gambling might not be pleasures to me; and, as for any
future pains likely to result from the practice, they will scarcely
426 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
be so intense, when my skin is hardened against many pangs
which would be formidable if inflicted now, as to be compared,
with the pleasure I now find in following my bent.'
'Ah, but think of the long succession of them; how much
they will amount to, when all put together.'
' But they never will be put together. I may fairly hope
that one will be over, and relieved by some interval of plea-
sure, before another begins. Unbroken continuance of even
slight pain is, no doubt, awful to anticipate. But there is
no reason to think that the pain consequent on this indul-
gence will be unbroken, or that, if there were nothing to
relieve it, I need live to endure it. If I found it becoming
unbearable, I should have the remedy iti my own hands.' :
' Perhaps we have been arguing the question upon wrong
grounds. The practice of gambling may not be demon-
strably productive of more pain than pleasure to you indi-
vidually, but there can be no doubt that it is so to society
generally. It is true that, in the present state of law and of
opinion, it does not violate any rule enforced by the poli-
tical or by the popular sanction, and thus, in the restricted
sense of the word, is not morally bad. But this state of law
and opinion is itself in violation of a law having a natural
sanction— the sanction consisting in the excess of pain
above pleasure produced by gambling to society in general.
It is thus bad in the sense of being pernicious, just as
Hobbes admitted that a law, though it could not be unjust,
might be pernicious. It ought to be changed, and you ought
to refuse to conform to it, in deference to a higher law than
that enforced by the state or public opinion, a law having
the natural sanction which belongs to any rule necessary to
the greatest happiness of the greatest number.'
' Here are three propositions, each more doubtful than the
other. It is not very easy to show that the practice is ^per-
nicious in that sense of the word which alone, as Hedonists,
we can admit ; viz. that more pleasure, after deduction for
counterbalancing pain, would at any time be felt by more
persons if the practice were changed. . You cannot dictate
CH. m] HEDONISM 427
to pebple what their pleasures shall be. If the practice is so
predominantly unpleasant in its consequences to the majority
as you say, why have they not found that out and stopped
it ? But granting that it is so, what do you mean by saying
that it ought to be changed ? This apparently is an obliga-
tion on the part of society, but to whom is it an obligation ?
An obligation on the part of the several members of the
society to each other and to the whole society is intelligible.
But in the absence of any law either of the state or of opinion
against the practice, it cannot be said that any such obliga-
tion is violated by the practice. An obligation of society to
itself is unintelligible. You say indeed that society ought
to change the practice, because it violates a law enforced by
a natural sanction. But here you are the victim of a figure
of speech. You are personifying ' nature ' as an imponent
of obligation. Stripped of figures of speech, this proposition
is merely a repetition of that already shown to be doubtful,
that the practice is pernicious — productive of more pain
than pleasure. If it is so, that is a reaspn for expecting that
society with increasing experience will see fit to refuse to
tolerate it, but none for saying that it ought to do so. Even
less is it a ground for saying that, w^hile the practice con-
tinues to be sanctioned by society, I ought not to indulge
in it. My taste for gambling does not conflict either with
positive law or with what is e;cpected of me by society. To
whom then am I under any obligation to renounce it ? It
cannot be held that it is a duty which I owe to myself; for,
if there is any meaning in that phrase, it can only meanj
according to our principles, that the practice tends more to
my pain than to my pleasure, and this we have seen there
is no reason for holding. If society with further experience
changes its mind on the matter, it may then make it more
painful for me to indulge my taste than to abstain ; but
there is no reason why I should anticipate the result of
social conflict in this or in any other case. Indeed, accord-
ing to Hedonistic principles, I could not if I would. For
the present from time to time a strongest desire^strongest
438 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bK. IV
because excited by imagination of what is for the time my
most intense pleasure — moves me to gamble, and I act ac-
cordingly. If society will furnish me with a stronger motive
for abstaining, let it do so. I can only await the change of
law or social opinion that will bring such a deterrent to bear
on me.'
351. This sort of Hedonistic fatalism seems to be logically
inherent in all Utilitarian philosophy which founds itself on
the principle that pleasure is the sole object of desire. That
this principle may be rejected by one who yet accepts the
Utilitarian doctrine of ultimate good, we know from the
example of Mr. Henry Sidgwick. Whether his rejection of
it is not really inconsistent with his view of the 'Summum
Bonum ' is a point to be considered later. What concerns us
here is the fact that the principle stated is taken as the foun-
dation of their Ethical doctrine alike by Bentham, J. S. Mill
and Mr. H. Spencer, and that, the more the Utilitarian
philosophy is applied to the direction of private conduct, the
more practically important this principle is likely to become,
and the more likely are speculative men to draw from it
those legitimate inferences which we have been considering,
to the embarrassment of their own higher impulses. That
in the most illustrious spokesmen of Utilitarianism no such
tendency has really appeared, is explained by their pre-occu-
pation with great projects of political and social ameliora-
tion, which made their theoretical reduction of the good to
pleasure of quite secondary importance. They had the great
lesson to teach, that the value of all laws and institutions,
the rectitude of all conduct, was to be estimated by refer-
ence to the well-being of all men, and that in the estimate
of that well-being no nation or class or individual was to
count above another. It mattered little for practical pur-
poses that they held the well-being of society to consist
simply of the nett aggregate of pleasures enjoyed by its
members, and that they founded this view on the principle
that some pleasure or other is the sole object of every
desire. The mischief latent in this principle could only
CH. Ill] HEDONISM 429
appear if it occurred to them to ask the question, which
their reforming zeal was too strong to allow them to ask,
why they should trouble themselves to alter their tastes and
habits, or those of other people. It is only when this ques-
tion has come to be commonly, asked by men at once suf-
ficiently free from the mastery either of the lower or of the
higher passions, and with sufficient command over the cir-
cumstances of their lives, for the answer to have real in-
fluence over their conduct, that the theoretical consequences
which we have seen to be involved in the Hedonistic prin-
ciple become of serious practical import.
We have then to consider, not so much whether the prin-
ciple that pleasure is the sole object of desire is itself tenable
— on that enough has been already said in this treatise — as
whether the doctrine which, having rejected this view of
desire, professes to find the absolutely desirable or 'Sum-
mum Bonum ' for man in some perfection of human life,
some realisation of human capacities, is of a kind, not only
to save speculative men from that suspicion of there being an
illusion in their impulses after a higher life which Hedonism
naturally yields, but also to guide those impulses in cases of
honest doubt as to the right line of action to adopt.
CHAPTER IV
THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF UTILITARIANISM COMPARED
WITH THAT OF THE THEORY OF THE GOOD
AS HUMAN PERFECTION
352. According to the doctrine of this treatise, as we
have previously endeavoured to state it, there is a principle
of self-development in man, independent of the excitement of
new desires by those new imaginations, which presuppose
new experiences, of pleasure. In virtue of this principle he
anticipates experience. In a certain sense he makes it,
instead, of merely waiting to be made by it. He is capable
of being moved by an idea of himself, as becoming that
which he has it in him to be — an idea which does not
represent previous experience, but gradually brings an
experience into being, gradually creates a filling for itself,
in the shape of arts, laws, institutions and habits of living,
■which, so far as they go, exhibit the capabilities of man,
define the idea of his end, afford a positive answer to the
otherwise unanswerable question, what in particular it is
that man has it in him to become. The action of such an
idea in the individual accounts for two things which, upon
the Hedonistic supposition, are equally unaccountable. It
accounts for the possibility of the question. Why should
I trouble about making myself or my neighbours other than
we are ? and, given the question, it accounts for an answer
being rendered to it, in the shape of a real initiation of
effort for the improvement of human life.
The supposition, therefore, of a free or self-objectifying
spiritual agency in human history is one to which a fair
analysis of human history inevitably leads us. But it remains
to be asked by what rule the effort is to be guided, which
we suppose the idea of a possible human perfection thus to
initiate. That idea, according to our view, is primarily in
THE GOOD AS HUMAN PERFECTION 431
man unfilled and unrealised ; and within the experience of
men it is never fully realised, never acquires a content
adequate to its capacity. There are arts and institutions
and rules of life, in which the human spirit has so far in-
completely realised its idea of a possible Best ; and the in-
dividual in whom the idea is at work will derive from it a
general injunction to further these arts, to maintain and, so
far as he can, improve these institutions. It is when this
general injunction has to be translated into particulars that
the difficulty arises. How is the essential to be distinguished
from the unessential and obstructive, in the processes through
which an effort after the perfection of man may be traced ?
How are the arts to become a more thoirough realisation of
the ideal which has imperfectly expressed itself in them ?
How are the institutions of social life, and the rules of con-
ventional morality, to be cleared of the alien growths which
they owe to the constant co-operation of selfish passions
with interest in common good, and which render them so
imperfectly organic to the development of the human spirit ?
Above all, how is this or that individual — circumstanced as
he is, and endowed, physically and mentally, as he is — to
take part in the work ? When he is called upon to decide
between adherence to some established rule of morality
and service to a particular person, or to face some new
combination of circumstances to which recognised rules of
conduct do not seem to apply, how is he to find guidance
in an idea which merely moves him to aim at the best and
highest in conduct ? In short, as we put the difficulty after
first stating the doctrine which finds the basis of morality in
such an idea (§ 198) — 'So far as it can be translated into
practice at all, must not its effect be either a dead conformity
to the code of customary morality, anywhere and at any
time established, without effort to reform or expand it, or
else unlimited licence in departing from it at the prompting
of any impulse which the individual may be pleased to con-
sider a higher law ? '
Unless these questions can be satisfactorily answered, it
432 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
would seem that our theory of the basis of morality, though
its adoption might save some speculative persons from that
distrust of their own conscience to which Hedonism would
naturally lead them, can be of no further practical value. It
may still serve to dispel the notion that the inclination to
take one's ease and let the world have its way is justified by
philosophy. It may still have an important bearing on that
examination by the individual of his own walk and conduct,
in which the question of motive should hold the first place ;
for it recognises, as the one motive which should be supreme,
a desire which the Hedonist must ignore. But it will have
no guidance to offer to the impulse which it explains, and of
which it asserts the importance. In those cases in which, as
we have previously pointed out, the question, Ought this or
that to be done ? has to be answered irrespectively of motive
and with reference merely to the effects of actions, it will be
of no avail. For that purpose we need some conception of a
'Summum Bonum' or ultimate good, definite enough to
enable us to enquire whether the effects of a particular action
contribute to that end or no. But if the idea of a possible
perfection of life cannot be translated into any definite con-
ceptions of what contributes to the attainment of that life,
except such as are derived from existing usage and law, it
cannot afford such a criterion as we want of the value of
possible actions, when we are in doubt which of them should
be done ; for we want a criterion that shall be independent
of law and usage, while at the same time it shall be other
than the casual conviction of the individual,
353. Now, as we have more than once admitted, we can
form no positive conception of what the ultimate perfection
of the human spirit would be ; what its life would be when
all its capabilities were fully realised. We can no more do
this than we can form a positive conception of what the
nature of God in itself is. All the notions that we can form
of human excellences or virtues are in some way relative to
present imperfections. We may say perhaps, with the
Apostle, that Faith, Hope and Charity 'abide;' that they
CH. iv] THE GOOD AS HUMAN PERFECTION 433
are not merely passing phases of a life which may come to
enter on conditions in which they would cease to be possible ;
and there may be a sense in which this is true. But when
we come to speak of the functions in which those virtues
manifest themselves, we find that we are speaking of func-
tions essentially relative to a state of society in which it is
impossible to suppose that the human spirit has reached its
full development. ' Charity beareth all things, believeth all
things, hopeth all things ; ' but if all men had come to be
what they should be, what would there be for Charity to
bear, to hope, and to believe ?
Though the idea of an absolutely perfect life, however,-
cannot be more to us than the idea that there must be such
a life, as distinct from an idea of what it is — and we may
admit this while holding that this idea is in a supreme sense
formative and influential — it does not follow that there is any
difficulty in conceiving very definitely a life of the individual
and of society more perfect, because more completely ful-.
filling the vocation of individual and society, than any which
is being lived. There may have been a period in the history
of our race when the idea of a possible perfection was a blindly
moving influence ; when it had not yet taken sufficient effect
in the ordering of life and the formation of virtues for reflec-
tion on these to enable men to say what it would be to be
more perfect. But we are certainly not in that state now.
We all recognise, and perhaps in some fragmentary way
practise, virtues which both carry in themselves unfulfilled
possibilities, and at the same time plainly point out the;
direction in which their own further development is to be
sought for. It has already been sought in this treatise to.
trace the ideal of the cardinal virtues, as recognised by the
conscience of Christendom. In none of these would the
man who came nearest the ideal 'count himself to have,
attained,' nor would he have any difficulty in defining the
path of his further attainment. No one is eager enough to
know what is true or make what is beautiful ; no one ready
enough to endure pain and forgo pleasure in the service of
Ff
434 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
his fellows : no one impartial enough in treating the claims
of another exactly as his own. Thus to have more 'intellectual
excellence ; ' to be more brave, temperate and just, in the
sense in which any one capable of enquiring what it is to be
more perfect would now understand these virtues, is a suffi-
cient object for him to set before himself by way of answer
to the question, so far as it concerns him individually ; while
a state of society in which these virtues shall be more
generally attainable and attained, is a sufficient account of
the more perfect life considered as a social good.
354. It would seem then that, though statements at once
positive and instructive as to the absolutely Best life may be
beyond our reach, yetj by help of mere honest reflection on
the evidence of its true vocation which the human spirit has
so far yielded in arts and sciences, in moral and political
achievement, we can know enough of a better life than our
own, of a better social order than any that now is, to have '
an available criterion of what is good or bad in law and
usage, and in the tendencies of men's actions. The working
theory of the end, which we derive from the doctrine that
the ultimate good for man must be some full development
of the human spirit in character and conduct, may be repre-
sented by some such question as the following : Does this
or that law or usage, this or that course of action— directly
or indirectly, positively or as a preventive of the opposite —
contribute to the better-being of society, as measured by the
more general establishment of conditions favourable to the
attainment of the recognised excellences and virtues, by the
more general attainment of those excellences in some degree,
or by their attainment on the part of some persons in higher
degree without detraction from the opportunities of others ?
In order to put this question we must, no doubt, have a
definite notion of the direction in which the 'Summum
Bonum ' is to be sought, but not of what its full attainment
would actually be ; and this, it will be found, is all that we
need or can obtain for our guidance in estimating the value
of laws and institutions, actions and usages, by their effects.
CH.1V] THE GOOD AS HUMAN PERFECTION 435
It will do nothing indeed to help us in ascertaining what
the effects of any institution or action really are. No theory
whatever of the 'Summum Bonum,' Hedonistic or other,
can avail for the settlement of this question, which requires
analysis of facts and circumstances, not consideration of
ends. But it will sufficiently direct us in regard to the kind
of effects we should look out for in our analysis, and to the
value we should put upon them when ascertained.
In all cases then in which, according to the distinction
previously explained, the question at issue is not. What
ought I to be ? but, What ought to be done ? the criterion
just stated should be our guide in answering it. As we
have seen, the question, What ought I to be ? includes the
question, What ought to be done? for I am not what
I ought to be — my character and motives are not what they
should be — unless my actions, in virtue of their effects, are
such as ought to be done. But, as we have also seen, for
that purpose which the question. Am I what I ought to be ?
mainly serves in ethical development — the puipose, namely,
of self-reproval and consequent incitement of the effort to be
better —no elaborate enquiry into the effects of actions done
is commonly needed; So far, however, as such an enquiry
is involved in the process of self-examination, the criterion
to be employed in the valuation of effects will be such as
we have described. It will have to be employed, again, in
all cases where we are judging the actions of others, whose
state of character is incognisableby us, or considering whether
outward action of a certain kind, irrespectively of motives, is
good or bad, whether certain institutions or practices of
society should be maintained or given up — these being all
questions solely of effect. It is a ciiterion, indeed, which
will seldom come to the front, even in the minds of those
who are most clearly aware that it is their criterion, because
in all ordinary cases of disinterested doubt as to the value of
institutions and usages, and of actions in which we are not
ourselves concerned, the question which occupies us is. What
under all the conditions of the case are the effects actually
F f 2
436 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
produced? not, What is the value of the effects? But it
should be, and (as we hold) with all men who have assimilated
the higher moral culture of Christendom really is, the measure
of value which is kept in view in the effort to ascertain the
effects of action, and which is tacitly applied in the estimate of
all ascertained effects that are susceptible of moral valuation.
355. The Utilitarian, if he can bring himself to attend to
what is here advanced, will probably say that in ordinary
cases and for practical purposes he can accept our criterion,
but that he cannot regard it as ultimate or scientific, and
that it fails us just in those cases where an ultimate or
scientific criterion is needed, because in them the rules of
established morality are insufficient or inapplicable. He
will not object to measure the better-being of society in an
ordinary way 'by the more general establishment of con-
ditions favourable to the attainment of the recognised
excellences and virtues, by the more general attainment of
those excellences in some degree, or by their attainment on
the part of some persons in higher degree without detraction
from the opportunities of others,' because he will hold that
these recognised virtues and excellences represent an in-
calculable accumulation of experience as to the modes in
which the largest balance of pleasure may be obtained.
Their exercise according to him does not constitute the
' Summum Bonum,' but under ordinary conditions it is an
ascertained means to it. ' Is there then,' the reader may
ask us, 'any practical difference between the Utilitarian
criterion and yours? You say that the effects of actions,
institutions, etc., are to be valued according to their relation
to the production of personal excellence, moral and intelr
lectual. The Utilitarian does not deny this ; but whereas,
according to you, the excellence is itself the ultimate end,
according to the Utilitarian it has its value only as a means
— speaking generally, a necessary and unfailing means— to
the production of the largest possible sum of pleasure.
Since you are both agreed, then, that the effects to be looked
at in all ordinary moral valuation are effects that have a
CH.IV] THE GOOD AS HUMAN PERFECTION 437
bearing on meritorious character, whether there be a further
end beyond that character or no, the several criteria come to
pretty much the same thing. It will only be in exceptional
cases that any difference between the two views of the
criterion need appear; in the estimation, for instance, of
some practice (such as vivisection may perhaps be reckoned)
which stands in no ascertained relation, direct or indirect,
to the maintenance, advancement, or diffusion of meritorious
conduct ; or in the estimation of some exceptional act to
which the general rule, that the nett maximum of possible
pleasure is only to be reached by following the paths of
recognised virtue, is rendered inapplicable by some pecu-
liarity in the circumstances of the case or in the position of
the agent. Here the Utilitarian must apply his ultimate
criterion directly. He must seek to ascertain the balance
of pleasure or pain resulting from the particular practice or
action, without the help of those records of prolonged obser-
vation upon pleasure-giving and pain-giving consequences
which the established rules of morality in effect supply.
This is no doubt a difficult task ; but, upon the theory
which rejects the Hedonistic calculus as criterion on the
ground that virtuous character and conduct is an end in
itself, is any criterion in such cases available at all ? '
356. Now it is satisfactory to acknowledge that the theory
of the criterion for which we are arguing does not for
practical purposes differ much from the Utilitarian, so long
as the Utilitarian view of the criterion is not founded — as it
generally has been, and perhaps logically should be — on the
Hedonistic theory of motives. The doctrine that pleasure
is the only possible object of desire logically excludes the
possibility of aspiration for personal holiness, of effort after
goodness for its own sake. According to it the state of will
and character which we have previously used the phrase
' purity of heart ' to describe, is not only an unrealisable
ideal, but an ideal which cannot excite desire for its attain-
ment at all. This theory of motives, therefore, is incom-
patible in principle wth the whole view of the nature of
438 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bK. IV
virtue, as issuing from a character in which the interest in
being good is dominant, already set forth in this treatise.
But if the Utilitarian is committed to no more than a certain
doctrine of the criterion of morality — the doctrine that the
value of actions and institutions is to be measured in
the last resort by their effect on the nett sum of pleasures
enjoyable by all human, or perhaps by all sentient, beings,
the difference between him and one who would substitute
for this ' nett sum, etc' 'the fulfilment of human capacities'
may be practically small. A desire for the enjoyment of
pleasure by others — whether in the largest quantity possible,
or in some more positively conceivable form — is so entirely
different from desire for a pleasure that, if the Utilitarian
considers his ' Summum Bonum,' or any limited form of it,
to be a possible object of desire to the individual, he clears
himself practically, even though it be at the sacrifice of con-
sistency, from chargeability with any such theory of motives
as would exclude the possibility of a 'pure heart.'
We are brought, then, to this point. The Utilitarian
theory of ultimate good, if founded upon the Hedonistic
theory of motives, we have found to be 'intrinsically
unavailable for supplying motive or guidance to a man who
wishes to make his life better,' because that theory of
motives, when argued out, appears to exclude, not indeed
the hope on the part of the individual that his own life and
that of mankind may become better, /. e. more pleasant, but
the belief that it can rest with him to exercise any initiative,
whether in the way of resistance to inclination or of painful
interference with usage, which may affect the result. We
saw reason to think that this logical consequence of the
theory tended to have at least a weakening influence upon
life and conduct, and that there was accordingly a practical
reason for seeking a substitute in another theory of ultimate
good. But the question now arises whether this substitute
shall be sought, according to the previous argument of this
treatise, in a theory which would place the 'Summum
Bonum ' in a perfection of human life, not indeed positively
CH. iv] THE GOOD AS GREATEST PLEASURE
439
definable by us, but having an identity with the virtuous life
actually achieved by the best men, as having for its principle
the same will to be perfect ; or rather in a revision of the
Utilitarian theory, which shall make it independent of the
Hedonistic theory of motives, while retaining the account
of the ' Summum Bonum ' as a maximum of possible
pleasure. We will endeavour to consider candidly what
the latter alternative has to recommend it.
357. It is noticeable in the first place that, if the Utili-
tarian doctrine of the chief good as criterion — the doctrine
that the greatest possible sum of pleasures is the end by
reference to which the value of actions is to be tested — is
dissociated from the Hedonistic doctrine of motives, though
it may be cleared from liability to bad practical, effects, it
has also lost what has been in fact its chief claim to the
acceptance of ordinary men. The process of its acceptance
has been commonly this. Because there is pleasure in all
satisfaction of desire, men have come to think that the
object of desire is always some pleasure ; that -every good is
a pleasure. From this the inference is natural enough that
a greatest possible sum of pleasures is a greatest possible
good — at any rate till it is pointed out that the possibility of
desiring a sum of pleasures, which never can be enjoyed as
a sum, would not follow from the fact that the object of
desire was always some imagined pleasure. But once drop
the notion that pleasure is the sole thing desired, and the
question arises why it should be deemed that which ' in our
calm moments ' is to be counted the sole thing desirable, so
that the value of all which men do or which concerns them
is to be measured simply by its tendency to produce pleasure.
We suppose ourselves now to be arguing with men who
admit the possibility of disinterested motives, who value
character according as it is habitually actuated by them;
who neither understand by such motives desires for that
kind of pleasure of which the contemplation of another's
pleasure is the condition, nor allow themselves to suppose
440 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
that, granting benevolence to be always a desire to produce
pleasure, it is therefore a desire for («. e. to enjoy) pleasure.
Why, we ask such persons, do you take that to be the one
thing ultimately desirable, which you not only admit to be
not the sole thing desired, but which you admit is not desired
in those actions which you esteem the most ?
358. It may be surmised that the chief attraction which
the Hedonistic criterion has had for such persons has
lain in its apparent definiteness. The conception of the
'Summum Bonum,' as consisting in a greatest possible
nett sum of pleasures, has seemed to afford a much more
positive and intelligible criterion than the conception of
a full reaUsation of human capacities, which we admit to be
only definable by reflection on the partial realisation of
those capacities in recognised excellences of character and
conduct. It promises an escape, too, from the circle in
which, as already observed, we seem to move, when we say
that we ought to do so and so because it is virtuous or
noble to do it, and then have to explain what is virtuous
Or noble as what we ought to do. A ' Summum Bonum '
consisting of a greatest possible sum of pleasures is supposed
to be definite and intelligible, because every one knows
what pleasure is. But in what sense does every one know
it? If only in the sense that every one can imagine the
renewal of some pleasure which he has enjoyed, it may be
pointed out that pleasures, not being enjoyable in a sum —
to say nothing of a greatest possible sum — cannot be
imagined in a sum either. Though this remark, however,
might be to the purpose against a Hedonist who held that
desire could only be excited by imagined pleasure, and yet
that a greatest sum of pleasure was an object of desire, it is not
to the purpose against those who merely look on the greatest
sum of pleasures as the true criterion, without holding that
desire is only excited by imagination of pleasure. They
will reply that, though we may not be able, strictly speaking,
to imagine a sum of pleasures, every one knows what it is.
Every one knows the difference between enjoying a longer
CH. iv] THE GOOD AS GREATEST PLEASURE 441
succession of pleasures and a shorter one, a succession of
more intense and a succession of less intense pleasures,
a succession of pleasures less interrupted by pain and one
more interrupted. In this sense every one knows the
difference between enjoying a larger sum of pleasures and
enjoying a smaller sum. He knows the difference also
between a larger number of persons or sentient beings and
a smaller one. He attaches therefore a definite meaning
to the enjoyment of a greater nett amount of pleasure by
a greater number of beings, and has a definite criterion for
distinguishing a better action from a worse, in the tendency
of the one, as compared with the other, to produce a greater
amount of pleasure to a greater number of persons.
359. The ability, however, to compare a larger sum of
pleasure with a smallei: in the sense explained — as we might
compare a longer time with a shorter — is quite a different
thing from ability to conceive a greatest possible sum of
pleasures, or to attach any meaning to that phrase. It seems,
indeed, to be intrinsically as unmeaning as it would be to
speak of a greatest possible quantity of time or space. The
sum of pleasures plainly admits of indefinite increase, with
the continued existence of sentient beings capable of plea-
sure. It is greater to-day than it was yesterday, and, unless
it has suddenly come to pass that experiences of pain out-
number experiences of pleasure, it will be greater to-morrow
than it is to-day ; but it will never be complete while sentient
beings exist. To say that ultimate good is a greatest pos-
sible sum of pleasures, strictly taken, is to say that it is an
end which for ever recedes ; which is not only unattainable
but from the nature of the case can never be more nearly
approached; and such an end clearly carmot serve the
purpose of a criterion, by enabling us to distinguish actions
which bring men nearer to it from those that do not. Are
we then, since the notion of a greatest possible sum of
pleasures is thus unavailable, to understand that in applying
the Utilitarian criterion we merely approve one action in
comparison with another, as tending to yield more pleasure
442 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bK. IV
to more beings capable of pleasure, without reference to
a ' Summum Bonum ' or ideal of a perfect state of existence
at all ? But without such reference is there any meaning
in approval or disapproval at all? It is intelligible that
without such reference the larger sum of pleasures should
be desired as against the less ; on supposition of benevolent
impulses, it is intelligible that the larger sum should be
desired by a man for others as well as for himself. But
the desire is one thing, the approval of it — the judgment ' in
a calm hour' that the desire of the action moved by it is
reasonable — is quite another thing. Without some ideal —
however indeterminate— of a best state of existence, with
the attainment of which the approved motive or action
may be deemed compatible, the approval of it would seem
impossible. Utilitarians have therefore to consider whether
they can employ a criterion of action, as they do employ
it, without some idea of ultimate good ; and, since a greatest
possible sum of pleasures is a phrase to which no idea
really corresponds, what is the idea which really actuates
them in the employment of their criterion.
360. When, having duly reflected on these points, we try
(if the expression may be pardoned) to make sense of the
Utilitarian theory — bearing in mind at once its implication
of the conception of a ' Summum Bonum,' and the impossi-
bility that of pleasures, so long as sentient beings continue
to enjoy themselves, there should be any such greatest sum
as can satisfy the conception — we cannot avoid the conclusion
that the ' Summum Bonum ' which the Utilitarian contem-
plates is not a sum of pleasures, but a certain state of exis-
tence; a state in which all human beings, or all beings
of whose consciousness he supposes himself able to take
account, shall live as pleasantly as is possible for them, with-
out one gaining pleasure at the expense of another. The
reason why he approves an action is not that he judges it
likely to make an addition to a sum of pleasures which never
comes nearer completion, but that he judges it likely to
contribute to this state of general enjoyable existence. If
CH.IV] THE GOOD AS GREATEST PLEASURE 443
he says that the right object for a man is to increase the stock
of human enjoyments, it is presumable that he is not really
thinking of an addition to a sum of pleasant experiences,
however large, which might be made and yet leave those
who had had the experiences with no more of the good in
possession than they had before. He does not mean that
a thousand experiences of pleasure constitute more of a good
than nine hundred experiences of the same intensity, or less
of a good than six hundred of a double intensity. He is
thinking of a good consisting in a certain sort of social life,
of which he does not particularise the nature to himself
further than by conceiving it as a pleasant life to all who
share in it, and as one of which all have the enjoyment, if
not equally, yet none at the cost of others. By increasing
the stock of enjoyments he means enabling more persons to
live pleasantly, or with less interruption from pain. The
good which he has before him is not an aggregate of plea-
sures but a pleasant life — a life at all times and for all per-
sons as pleasant, as little marred by pain, as possible ; but
good, qua a life in which the persons living are happy or
enjoy themselves, not qua a life into which so many enjoy-
ments are crowded.
361. Now the objection to this conception of a chief good
is not that, so far as it goes, it is otherwise than true. Ac-
cording to our view, since there is pleasure in all realisation
of capacity, the life in which human capacities should be
fully realised would necessarily be a pleasant life '■■ The
objection is that, instead of having that definiteness which,
because all know what pleasure is, it seemed at first to
promise, it turns out on consideration to be so abstract and
indefinite. It tells us nothing of that life, to the attainment
of which our actions must contribute if they are to be what
they should be, but merely that it would be as pleasant as
possible for all persons, or for all beings of whose conscious-
ness we can take account. The question is whether in
thinking of an absolutely desirable life, as the end by refer-
' [Cf. however § 276.]
444 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bK.IV
fence to which the effects of our actions are to be valued,
our view must be confined to the mere quaUty of its uni-
versal pleasantness, and whether in consequence productivity
of pleasure is the ultimate ground on which actions are to
be approved. The view for which we plead is that the
quality of the absolutely desirable life, which renders it such
in man's thoughts, is that it shall be the full realisation of
his capacities ; that, although pleasure must be incidental to
such realisation, it is in no way distinctive of it, being equally
incidental to any unimpeded activity, to the exercise of
merely animal functions no less than to those that are pro-
perly human ; that, although we know not in detail what
the final realisation of man's capacities would be, we know
well enough, from the evidence they have so far given of
themselves, what a fuller development of them would be ;
and that thus, in the injunction to make life as full a realisa-
tion as possible of human capacities, we have a definiteness
of direction, which the injunction to make life as pleasant as
possible does not supply.
362. Such definiteness of direction as is derivable from
the latter injunction really depends on the assumption that,
with a view to the general enjoyment of life, conduct should
follow the paths of recognised virtue. On supposition that
the requirements of conventional morality represent a great
mass of experience as to the social behaviour by which life
is rendered more generally pleasant, we may be sure that as
a rule their violation is not the way to help men on the
whole to live more pleasantly. The supposition need not
be disputed. But how did these requirements, or what is
really beneficent in them, come to be formed ? There was
a time when they did not yet amount to the requirements of
a conventional morality — when a large part of them were as
yet only the convictions of a few peculiar people as to what
was needed in the interest of a better social being. Whence
then did these few derive direction for those efforts to make
social life what it should be, which our present conventional
morality was not there to guide, and which any conventional
CH.IV] THE GOOD AS GREATEST PLEASURE 445
morality then current would have discountenanced ? Would
not the mere injunction to make human life as pleasant as
possible, failing the interpretation which our present con-
ventional morality may supply, but which it was not then
there to supply, have had either no, significance for them or
a misleading one — a misleading significance if taken to be
interpreted by the then recognised standards of meritorious
conduct, and otherwise none ? Has not the spirit in which
the better being of society has in fact been promoted been
generally that which Mr. Browning puts into the mouth of
his Rabbi Ben Ezra ? —
Then, welcome each rebuff
That turns earth's smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go !
Be our joys three-parts pain !
Strive, and hold cheap the strain ;
Learn, nor account the pang ; dare, never grudge the throe ! *
And would this spirit ever have found its inward law
in an injunction to produce as much pleasure as pos-
sible— to seek as its supreme object to obtain that for
others which it would reject for itself? Does not the same
spirit still find such an injunction unmeaning or repellent,
in those cases where it needs, owing to the felt insufficiency
of the rales of conventional morality, to resort for direction
to some conception of ultimate good ?
363. It may be retorted, however, that by our own con-
fession the injunction to realise the capacities, to make the
most and best, of the' human soul, derives its definite content
from reference to the recognised virtues and excellences of
life. It is an injunction to attain these more fully, to render
■ [The following passage from the Epilogue to ' Romola,' which the
author intended to quote at some point in this chapter, may be added
here : 'We can only have the highest happiness, such as goes along
with being a great man, by having wide thoughts, and much feeling
for the rest of the world as well as ourselves ; and this sort of happi-
ness often brings so much pain with it, that we can only tell it from
pain by its being what we Would choose before everything else,
because our souls see it is good.']
446 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
them more generally attainable, to give further realisation to
the spirit which has expressed itself in them. If it on the
one hand, and the injunction to make life as pleasant as
possible on the other, have alike need of this reference in
order to acquire definite meaning, what advantage has the
former over the latter? Its advantage we take to be this.
The former injunction does, while the latter does not, corre-
spond to the inward law by which men have been governed
in the effort and aspiration that have yielded the various
excellences in the way of art and knowledge, no less than of
conduct, which now determine our ideal of further perfection.
Accordingly in those cases — very exceptional, as we have all
along pointed out — where the difference between the two
injunctions would make itself practically apparent, the one
would, while the other would not, suggest a manner of life,
a standard of achievement in knowledge and art, higher
than that which current expectations call for. A man who
interprets the recognised virtues and excellences as having
been arrived at with a view to the increase of pleasure, who
holds them to be valuable only as means to that end, has
not the clue to guide him in cases where it is no longer
enough to follow the ' law of opinion ' or social expectation,
but where it behoves him to act in the higher spirit of those
virtues and excellences^ — a spirit which he must interpret for
himself. The question whether it would conduce mofe to
general pleasure that he should set up for being belter than
his neighbours, instead of swimming with the stream ; that
he should follow the severer path of duty, where his departure
from it would be unknown or uncondemned, and where it
would save himself and those whom he loves from much
suffering ; that he should seek the highest beauty in art, the
completes! truth in knowledge, rather than conform to
popular taste and opinion— this is a question which he will
find for ever unanswerable; and, in presence of its un-
ansvverability, the fact that his own pleasure will undoubtedly
be served by deciding it in the easier way is likely to have
considerable weight. If, on the other hand, he were governed
CH. iv] ULTIMATE GOOD 447
by the conviction that the recognised virtues and excellences
are ends in themselves, because in them the human spirit in
some measure fulfils its divine vocation, attains something
of the perfection which it lies in it to attain, he would find
in reflection on them an indication of the ends to be kept
in view, where the rule of being virtuous according to some
established type of virtue is insufficient, as well as a constant
direction to estimate at its highest the claim on his personal
devotion to the further perfecting of man.
364. Before we attempt finally to illustrate the manner in
which these different conceptions of ultimate good, and the
different injunctions founded on them, would be likely under
certain conditions to affect the practical judgment, it will be
well to remove one more possible misapprehension as to the
distinction between them. They are not to be distinguished
as if according to one the ' Summum Bonum ' were a state
of desirable consciousness, while according to the other it
was not. It is agreed that in presenting a 'Summum Bonum '
to ourselves we present it as a state of desirable conscious-
ness. Except as some sort of conscious life it can be to us
nothing ; and to say that we think of it as desirable is the
same thing as to say that we think of it as good. The
question is whether we think of it as good or desirable
because we anticipate pleasure in it, or because and so far
as we already desire it, knowing that there must be pleasure
in the satisfaction of a desire, though pleasure be not the
object of the desire. Utilitarians, however — even such
Utilitarians as Mr. Henry Sidgwick ^ — are apt to argue as if
to hold that the ultimate standard of moral valuation is
something else than the productivity of pleasure, was to hold
that it is something else than productivity of desirable con-
sciousness. So to argue is quite consistent in those who
take pleasure to be the sole object of desire ; for with them,
if any kind of conscious life admits of being desired — and
1 Methods of Ethics, Book III. chap. xiv. § a. pp. 368-370 (2nd
Edition).
448 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
unless it admits of being desired, it cannot be desirable — it
must be on the ground of the pleasure anticipated in it. But
if this view is rejected, as it is rejected by Mr. Sidgwick, it
does not appear why a state of consciousness should not be
desired for another reason than for the sake of the pleasure
anticipated in it, or why it should not be for another reason
that 'when we sit down in a calm hour' we deem it desirable.
The present writer holds as strongly as Mr. Sidgwick could
do that it is only in some form of conscious life — more
definitely, of self-conscious life— that we can look for the
realisation of our capacities or the perfection of our being ;
in other words, for ultimate good. While regarding Truth,
Freedom, Beauty, etc., as constituent elements of the highest
good, not as means to a good beyond them, he would under-
stand by them, in Mr. Sidgwick's words \ the ' relations of
conscious minds which we call cognition of Truth, contem^
plation of Beauty, Independence of action, etc' He admits
further that desire for perfection of being — the desire of which
the operation in us gives meaning to the statement that the
attainment of such perfection is supremely desirable — carries
with it some anticipation of the pleasure there would be in
satisfaction of the desire, an anticipation which renders the
description of the highest state as one of happiness or bliss
natural to us. His contention is that to suppose pleasure
on that account to be the object of our desire for supreme
pr ultimate good, is to repeat the mistake, to which
Mr. Sidgwick is so thoroughly alive, of confusing the
pleasure which attends the satisfactiori of a desire with the
object of the desire, and the anticipation of that pleasure
with the desire itself. It is not because looked forward to
as pleasant, that the form of conscious life in which our
capacities shall be fully realised is an object of desire to us ;
' Methods of Ethics, p. 368. Mr. Sidgwick writes, ' the objective
relations of conscious minds.' I have omitted 'objective' from rot
being quite sure of its significance in this connection. Nor am I sure
that I could accept ' Independence of action ' as an equivalent for
' Freedom,' in that sense in which I look upon ' Freedom ' as a
constituent of the highest good.
CH. IV] ULTIMATE GOOD 449
it is because, in such self-conscious beings as we are, a desire
for their realisation goes along with the presence of the
capacities, that the form of conscious life in which this desire
shall be satisfied is looked forward to as pleasant. And it is
because the object of this desire, when reflected on, from the
nature of the case presents itself to us as absolutely final,
not because we anticipate pleasure in its attainment as we
do in that of any and every desired object, that ' in a calm
hour ' we pronounce it supremely desirable.
365. Now it would be unfair to convey the impression
that Mr. Sidgwick, in identifying that 'desirable conscious-
ness,' which he holds that ultimate good must be, simply
with pleasure, is chargeable with confusion between the object
of a desire and the pleasure anticipated in its satisfaction.
The result of such a confusion, unless avoided by a further
one, would be ' Egoistic ' Hedonism, not the ' Universalistic '
Hedonism which he himself adopts. In the common He-
donistic ratiocination — we always anticipate pleasure in the
satisfaction of desire, therefore pleasure is the sole thing
desired, therefore the sole thing desirable— pleasure must
throughout mean pleasure for the person supposed to desire
it. Since it is not pretended that it rneans anything else in
the two former steps of the ratiocination, it must mean it
also in the last. It can be taken to mean the pleasure of
others, or of all men, only through a confusion between desire
to enjoy pleasure and desire to produce it, from which
Mr. Sidgwick keeps quite free. It is not upon any such
ratiocination that he founds his own conclusion that ' desir-
able feeling ' (by which he understands pleasure) ' for the
innumerable multitude of living beings, present and to
come V is the one end ' ultimately and intrinsically desir-
able ; ' but on an appeal to what he calls ' common sense.'
' As rational beings we are manifestly bound to aim at good
generally, not merely at this or that part of it V and in the
last resort we can give no meariing to good but happiness,
which ;= desirable consciousness, which = pleasure. Reason
■ Methods of Ethics, p. 371. ' Ibid. p. 355.
Gg
45^ PRACtlCAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [fiK. IV
therefore bids us aim at a supreme good, made up of the
goods (or happinesses) of all sentient beings; at the good of
one sentient being equally with another, ' except in so far as
it is less, or less certainly knowable or attainable.'
Now in this theory it is clear that an ofHce is ascribed to
Reason which in ordinary Utilitarian doctrine, as in the
philosophy of Locke and Hume on which that doctrine is
founded, is explicitly denied to it. To say that as rational
beings we are bound to aim at anything whatever in the
nature of an ultimate end, would have seemed absurd to
Hume and to the original Utilitarians. To them reason was
a faculty not of ends but of means. As a matter of fact, they
held, we all do aim at pleasure as our ultimate end ; all that
could properly be said to be reasonable or unreasonable was
our selection of means to that end. They would no more
have thought of asking why pleasure ought to be pursued
than of asking why any fact ought to be a fact. Mr. Sidgwick,
however, does ask the. question, and answers that pleasure
ought to be pursued because reason pronounces it desirable;
but that, since reason pronounces pleasure, if equal in
amount, to be equally desirable by whatever being enjoyed,
it is universal pleasure— the pleasure of all sentient beingsr-
that ought to be pursued. It is not indeed an object that
every one ought at all times to have consciously before
him', but it is the ultimate good by reference to which,
' when we sit down in a calm hour,' the desirability of every
other good is to be tested,
366. In this procedure Mr. Sidgwick is quite consistent
with himself. His rejection of 'Egoistic' in favour of
' Universalistic ' Hedonism rests upon a ground which in
Mr. Mill's doctrine it is impossible to discover. His appeal
to reason may be made to justify the recognition of an
obligation to regard the happiness of all men or all animals
equally, which, upon the doctrine that pleasure is the one
thing desirable because the one thing desired, can only be
logically justified by the untenable assumption that the only
' Methods of Ethics, p. 381.
CH.1V] ULTIMATE GOOD 451
way to obtain a maximum of pleasure for oneself is to have
an equal regard for the pleasure of everyone else. But
Mr. Sidgwick's way of justifying his Altruism constrains us
to ask him some further questions. What does he under-
stand by the 'reason' to which he ascribes the office of
deciding what the one ' ultimately and intrinsically desirable
end ' is ; not on the means to it, but on the nature of the end
itself? In saying that it is reasonable to pursue desirable
consciousness, is he not open to the same charge of moving
in a circle which he brings against those who say that it is
reasonable to live according to nature, or virtuous to seek
perfection, while after all they have no other account to give
of the life according to nature but that it is reasonable, or
of perfection but that it is the highest virtue ^ ? What does
he mean by desirable consciousness but the sort of con-
sciousness which it is reasonable to seek ?
He apparently avoids the circle, no doubt, by describing
the desirable consciousness as pleasure ; but the escape is
only apparent. A statement that it is reasonable to seek
pleasure would not itself be chargeable with tautology, but,
unless it meant that it was reasonable to seek pleasure for
the sake of some chief good other than pleasure (in which
sense the statement is not likely to be made), it would be
absurd. If we hold pleasure to be itself the good, because
the object of all desire, and if we are careful about our words,
we may call it reasonable to seek certain means to it, but not
to seek pleasure itself. Mr. Sidgwick himself, as we have
seen, is not guilty of this absurdity, because he carefully
distinguishes the desired from the desirable. His doctrine
is not that it is reasonable to seek pleasure in that sense in
which Hedonistic writers take it to be the one thing desired,
i.e. as the pleasure of the person seeking it, but that it is
reasonable to seek to convey pleasure to all sentient beings,
because this universal enjoyment, though it is only in certain
exceptional 'calm hours' desired, is intrinsically and ulti-
mately desirable or good. Now does he mean anything else
' Methods of Ethics, p. .352.
Gg2
452 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [BK, IV
by 'desirable' in this connection than 'reasonably to be
desired ' ? If not, does not his doctrine come to this, that it
is reasonable to seek as ultimate good that form of conscious
life which is reasonably to be desired ?
367. It will be understood that, in thus criticising
Mr. Sidgwick's account of ultimate good, our object is
not to depreciate it, but to show how much more truth
there is in it, from our point of view, than in the common
statement of Utilitarianism. We have previously explained
how it comes about that any true theory of the good will
present an appearance of moving in a circle. The rational
or self-conscious soul, we have seen, constitutes its own end ;
is an end at once to and in itself Its end is the perfection
of itself, the fulfilment of the law of its being. The con-
sciousness of there being such an end expresses itself in the
judgment that something absolutely should be, that there is
something intrinsically and ultimately desirable. This judg-
ment is, in this sense, the expression of reason ; and all
those who, like Mr. Sidgwick, recognise the distinction
between the absolutely desirable and the de facto desired,
have in effect admitted that reason gives — is the source of
there being — a supreme practical good. If we ask for
a reason why we should pursue this end, there is none to be
given but that it is rational to do so, that reason bids it, that
the pursuit is the effort of the self-conscious or rational soul
after its own perfection. It is reasonable to desire it because
it is reasonably to be desired. Those who like to do so may
make merry over the tautology. Those who understand how
it arises — from the fact, namely, that reason gives its own
end, that the self-conscious spirit of man presents its own
perfection to itself as the intrinsically desirable — will not be
moved by the mirth. They will not try to escape the charge
of tautology by taking the desirableness of ultimate good to
consist in anything else than in the thought of it as that
which would satisfy reason^satisfy the demand of the self-
conscious soul for its own perfection. They will not appeal
to pleasure, as being that which in fact we all desire, in
CH. IV] ULTIMATE GOOD
453
order to determine oilr notion of what reason bids as desire.
They will be aware that this notion cannot be determined
by reference to anything but what reason has itself done ;
by anything but reflection on the excellences of character
and conduct to which the rational effort after perfection
of life has given rise. They will appeal to the virtues
to tell them what is virtuous, to goodness to tell them what
is truly good, to the work of reason in human life to tell
them what is reasonably to be desired ; knowing well what
they are about in so "doing, and that it is the only appro-
priate procedure, because only in the full attainment of its
end could reason learn fully what that end is, and only in
what it has so far attained of the end can it learn what its
further attainment would be.
368. It is perhaps unjustifiable to ascribe to any one
a course of thought which he would himself disavow ; but
we naturally ask for a reason why Mr. Sidgwick, having
accepted principles, as it would seem, so antagonistic to
those of the philosophic Utilitarians, should end by accept-
ing their conclusion. When we consider on the one hand
his implied admission that it is reason which presents us
with the idea of ultimate good, and on the other his pro-
fession of inability to look for that good in anything but the
pleasure of all sentient beings, the conjecture suggests itself
that, while really thinking of the ultimately desirable as con-
sisting in the satisfaction of reason, he shrank from a state-
ment seemingly so tautological and uninstructive as that the
end which reason bids us seek is the satisfaction or perfec-
tion of the rational nature itself. He was thus led to cast
about for an account of the supreme good in terms which
should not imply its essential relation to reason. 'Pleasure
of all sentient beings' does not imply any such relation,
for there is nothing in the enjoyment of pleasure which
reason is needed to constitute; and no one,, except under
constraint of some extravagant theory, denies that pleasure
is good. Thus the statement that universal pleasure is the.
ultimate good which reason bids us seek, seems on the one
454 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
hand to avoid the admitted absurdity of saying that reason
bids us seek our own pleasure, and, on the other, the tauto-
logy of saying that reason bids us seek the satisfaction of reason.
But why does no one deny that pleasure is good? Because
every one is conscious of desiring pleasure for himself. That
is to say, pleasure is good, not as = the desirable, but as = the
desired ; and the pleasure which is thus good is not universal
pleasure but the pleasure of the subject desiring it, as related
to his desire. Thus between the proposition that pleasure
is good as = the desired, and the proposition that universal
pleasure is good as = the rationally desirable, the connection
(as Mr. Sidgwick is too acute not to perceive) is merely
verbal. The latter can only be derived from the former on
supposition that reason presents to itself as the desirabk—
as good in this sense — the enjoyment by every sentient
being of the pleasure which he in fact desires, and which is
good for him in that sense. Even if this supposition be
granted, it will still be the satisfaction of reason that consti-
tutes the good in the sense of the ultimately desirable,
though reason will be supposed to satisfy itself in the con-
templation of the enjoyment by every being of that which
is good in the sense of being desired, viz. pleasure. The
question will then be whether reason can thus satisfy itself.
Is it in contemplation of the enjoyment of unbroken pleasure
by all sentient beings that we are to think of the rational
soul as saying to itself that at length its quest for ultimate
good has found its goal ?
369. To this question — which, it will of course be under-
stood, is not put by Mr. Sidgwick himself, but to which, in
our view, his doctrine leads — his answer seems ambiguous.
He holds indeed that a maximum of possible pleasure for
all sentient beings is the ultimate good at which reason bids
us aim, but he explains that by pleasure he means 'desirable
consciousness.' Now unless we are to forget the distinction
between the desired and the desirable which we might learn
from Mr. Sidgwick himself, we cannot suppose that the
' Methods of Ethics, p. 361.
CH. iv] ULTIMATE GOOD 455
rational soul, in presenting a desirable consciousness on its
own part as involved in ultimate good, presents it simply as
so much pleasure. The very fact that it asks for a con-
sciousness which is desirable or should be desired, shows
that it cannot satisfy itself with that which every one naturally
desires, but of which for that reason no one can think as
what he should desire. The presentation of an object as
one that should be desired implies that it is not desired as
a pleasure by the person to. whom it so presents itself A
man may speak significantly of another person's pleasure as
desirable, but not of his own. The desirableness of a plea-
sure must always express its relation to some one else than
the person desiring the enjoyment of the pleasure. Thus
to suppose a consciousness to be at once desired as a plea-
sure, and contemplated as desirable by the same person, is
a contradiction. To the man who 'in a calm hour' sets
before himself a certain form of conscious life as the object
which reason bids him aim at, though it is not impossible
that pleasure should be the desirable quality in that life as
he seeks to bring it about for other people, it cannot be the
desirable quality in it as he seeks to obtain it for himself.
When we are told, therefore, that ultimate good is desirable
consciousness or pleasure for all sentient beings, we reply
that, though it may be sought as pleasure for all sentient
beings, it cannot be sought as his own pleasure by one who
also contemplates it as the consciousness desirable for him-
self. The description of ultimate good as pleasure, and the
description of it as desirable (not desired) consciousness, are
incompatible descriptions, so far as they are descriptions of
a state of being which the rational soul seeks as its own.
370. Now, according to the view already stated in this
treatise, the rational soul in seeking an ultimate good neces-
sarily seeks it as a state of its own being. An ultimate, in-
trinsic, absolute good has no meaning for us, except that
which it derives from the effort of the rational soul in us to
become all that it is conscious of a capacity for becoming.
As the rational soul is essentially the principle of self-con-
456 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
sciousness, so the idea of ultimate good on the part .of every
one capable of it is necessarily the idea of a perfect self-
conscious life for himself. The desirableness of that life is
its desirableness as his own life. But to any one actuated
by it the idea of a perfection, of a state in which he shall be
satisfied, for himself will involve the idea of a perfection of
all other beings, so far as he finds the thought of their being
perfect necessary to his own satisfaction. Moral develop-
ment, as has been previously explained more at large, is a
progress in which the individual's conception of the kind of
life that would be implied in his perfection gradually be-
comes fuller and more determinate ; fuller and more deter-
minate both in regard to the range of persons whose partici-
pation in the perfect life is thought of as necessary to its
attainment by any one, and in regard to the qualities on the
part of the individual which it is thought must be exercised
in it. In the most complete determination within our reach,
the conception still does not suffipe to enable any one to
say positively what the perfection of his life would be ; but
the determination has reached that stage in which the edu-
cated citizen of Christendom is able to think of the perfect
life as essentially conditioned by the exercise of virtues,
resting on a self-sacrificing will, in which it is open to all
men to participate, and as fully attainable by one man, only
in so far as through those virtues it is attained by all. In
thinking of ultimate good he thinks of it indeed necessarily
as perfection for himself; as a life in which he shall be fully
satisfied through having become all that the spirit within
him enables him to become. But he cannot think of him-
self as satisfied in any life other than a social life, exhibiting
the exercise of self-denying will, and in which 'the multitude
of the redeemed,' which is all men, shall participate. He
has other faculties indeed than those which are directly ex-
hibited in the specifically moral virtues — faculties which find
their expression not in his dealings with other men, but in
the arts and sciences — and the development of these must
be a necessary constituent in any life which he presents to
OH. iv] ULTIMATE GOOD 457
himself as one in which he can find satisfaction. But 'when
he sits down in a calm hour' it will not be in isolation that
the development of any of these faculties will assume the
character for him of ultimate good. Intrinsic desirableness,
sufficiency to satisfy the rational soul, will be seen to belong
to their realisation only in so far as it is a constituent in a
whole of social life, of which the distinction, as a social life,
shall be universality of disinterested goodness.
371. We should accept the view, then, that to think of
ultimate good is to think of an intrinsically desirable form
of conscious life ; but we should seek further to define it.
We should take it in the sense that to think of such good is
to think of a state of self-conscious life as intrinsically de-
sirable for oneself, and for that reason is to think of it as
something else than pleasure — the thought of an object as
pleasure for oneself, and the thought of it as intrinsically
desirable for oneself, being thoughts which exclude each
other. The pleasure anticipated in the life is not that which
renders it desirable j but so far as desire is excited by the
thought of it as desirable, and so far as that desire is reflected
on, pleasure comes to be anticipated in the satisfaction of
that desire. The thought of the intrinsically desirable life,
then, is the thought of something else than pleasure, but the
thought of what ? The thought, we answer, of the full realisa-
tion of the capacities of the human soul, of the fulfilment of
man's vocation, as of that in which alone he can satisfy
himself — a thought of which the content is never final and
complete, which is always by its creative energy further de-
termining its own content, but which for practical purposes,
as the mover and guide of our highest moral effort, may be
taken to be the thought of such a social life as that described
in the previous paragraph. The thought of such a life, again,
when applied as a criterion for the valuation of the probable
effects of action, may be taken to be represented by the
question stated in § 354 : — 'Does this or that law or usage,
this or that course of action — directly or indirectly, positively
or as preventive of the opposite — contribute to the better
458 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
being of society, as measured by the more general establish-
ment of conditions favourable to the attainment of the
recognised virtues and excellences, by the more general
attainment of those excellences in some degree, or by their
attainment on the part of some persons in higher degree
without detraction from the opportunities of others?' It
remains for us now finally to consider the availability of the
injunctions and criteria founded on such a theory of ultimate
good, as compared with those derivable from the identifica-
tion of ultimate good with a universal enjoyment of pleasure,
in those exceptional cases in which their comparative avail-
ability is hkely to be put to the test.
372. As has been already remarked, these cases will be
exceptional owing to the efficiency of the direction for out-
ward conduct which conventional morality now commonly
affords. The origin of that morality is not here in question.
If there is reason to hold, as it has been previously sought
to show, that the progressive principle in morality, through
which the recognised standard of virtuous living among us
has come to be what it is, has not been an interest either in
the enjoyment or in the production of pleasure, there is so
far a presumption against general pleasure being the ultimate
good to which we should look for direction when conven-
tional morality fails us. But the reader naturally asks for
a conclusion more definite than this presumption. He will
wish to satisfy himself whether, in the settlement of real
questions of conduct, our theory of ultimate good has any
advantage over that which Mr. Sidgwick describes as Univer-
salistic Hedonism — whether under any conditions it might,
afford other and better guidance. In discussing this point
we must suppose the person who resorts to either theory for
guidance to have accepted the direction of conventional
morality, so far as it goes — the one on the ground that it
represents a decisive amount of transmitted experience as to
the pleasure-giving or pain-giving effects, on the whole, of
different kinds of action ; the other on the ground that its
CH.IV] PRACTICAL VALVE OF MORAL THEORIES 459
observance, unless the contrary can be shown, must be taken
as at least a condition of the social well-being which he would
measure by the prevalence of a virtuous will.
We must also keep out of sight difficulties that do not
relate to the valuation of the anticipated effects of actions,
but to the question what effects are to be anticipated from
them. In many cases the whole practical difficulty of de-
ciding whether a contemplated action ought or ought not to
be done, is the difficulty of deciding what effects are likely
to follow from it ; not of valuing the effects if once they
could be ascertained, but of ascertaining what they will be.
No theory of ultimate good has an advantage over another
in dealing with this difficulty, since none rather than another
can claim to give us knowledge of facts, or to make us clear-
sighted and patient in the analysis of circumstances. Any
difference in respect of influence upon the practical judg-
ment between the two theories in question must arise from
the different value which they severally lead us to put upon
effects ascertained or expected, not from any different
methods which they suggest of ascertaining the effects of
action, nor from any difference in the importance which they
lead us to attach to doing so.
373. In a previous paragraph (§ 338) examples have been
given of the kind of question in regard to personal conduct,
in his answer to which a speculative person might be affected
for the worse by a logical application of the Utilitarian theory
of good, so far as that theory is founded on the principle
that pleasure is the only possible object of desire. We are
now supposing this principle to be dropped, but the Utilitarian
doctrine of the chief good to be retained. We are dealing
with a theory in which the action of disinterested motives,
in the natural sense of the words (as desires which have not
pleasure directly or indirectly for their object), is fully recog-
nised, and the identification of ultimate good with a maxi-
mum of universal pleasure is accepted on the ground of its
supposed intrinsic reasonableness. The question is whether,
in cases of the Icind supposed, a logical application of this
460 PRACTICAL VALUE OF' MORAL THEORY [bK. IV
conception of ultimate good, as a criterion ofwhat should be
done, will be of any avail. The cases are of a kind in which it
has to be decided whether, in words already used (§ 363), a
man ' should set up for being better than his neighbours or
should swim with the stream ; whether he should follow the
severer path of duty where his departure from it would be
unknown or uncondemned, and where it would save himself
and those whom he loves from much suffering ; whether he
should seek the highest beauty in art, the completest truth in
knowledge, rather than conform to popular taste and opinion.'
For the purposes of such a decision our contention is not
that of itself the theory of Universalistic Hedonism would
yield a wrong answer, but that it would yield none at all,
and would thus in effect leave the decision to be made by
the enquirer's inclination to the course of action which is
most pleasant or least painful to him individually.
374. We have already seen how, when the question before
the individual is whether for the sake of some higher good
he should depart from the course of action to which custom
or inclination, or the sense of what the opinion of his class
requires of him, would naturally lead him, the logical ten-
dency of the doctrine that pleasure is the sole object of
desire must be to entangle him in a Hedonistic fatalism,
which would mean paralysis of the moral initiative. Uni-
versalistic Hedonism, as Mr. Sidgwick conceives it, is not
chargeable with this tendency. It justifies the question.
What should I do for the bettering of life ? for it recognises
the possibility of an initiative notdetermined by imagination
of pleasure or pain. But for doubts of the kind we are con-
sidering, where conventional morality cannot be appealed to
as representing accumulated experience of consequences in
the way of pleasure and pain, it seems to afford no solution.
We have supposed a man in doubt whether^ in consideration
of the claims of society, he is justified in spending so much
of his time in the gratification of his taste for music or of
his curiosity in literature, or in continuing a habit of ' mode-
rate drinking.' Let such an one translate ' in consideration
CH.iy] PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORIES 461
of the claims of society ' into ' with a view to producing as
much pleasure as possible to all beings capable of it.' Must
it not be apparent to him, just so far as he really apprehends
the nature of the problem which he professes to set before
himself, that it is wholly insoluble ? What knowledge has
he, or from the nature of the case can he obtain, either of
the conditions on which the pleasures of all other beings,
present and to come, depend or will depend, or of the
various degrees to which other men — to say nothing of the
animals — are susceptible of pleasure, that he should be
able to judge whether the suggested breach of custom, the
suggested resistance to personal inclination, is likely to con-
tribute to the ' Summum Bonum ' which he adopts as his
criterion ? Unless he has really some other conception of
ultimate good to fall back upon, will he not inevitably take
refuge in the justification which the theory of Universalistic
Hedonism affords him for attaching most importance to the
most certainly known pleasures, and let custom and inclina-
tion decide him ?
375. In fact, the man who is challenged by doubts of
the kind described, who asks himself whether he is duly
responding to claims which conventional morality does not
recognise, always has another standard of ultimate good
to fall back upon, however much his Hedonistic philosophy
may obscure it to him. That standard is an ideal of
a perfect life for himself and other men, as attainable for
him only through them, for them only through him ; a life
that shall be perfect, in the sense of being the fulfilment
of all that the human spirit in him and them has the real
capacity or vocation of becoming, and which (as is implied
in its being such fulfilment) shall rest on the will to be
perfect. However unable he may be to give an account of
such an ideal, it yet has so much hold on him as to make
the promotion of goodness for its own sake in himself and
others an intelligible end to him. The reader, however,
will be weary of hearing of this jdeal, and will be waiting
-to know in .what particular way it can afford. guidance jn
462 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bK. IV
cases of the kind supposed, where conventional morality
and Utilitarian theory alike fail to do so. We have argued
that no man could tell whether, by denying himself accord-
ing to the examples given, he would in the whole result
increase the amount of pleasant living in the world, present
and to come. Can he tell any better whether he will further
that realisation of the ideal just described, in regard to which
we admit the impossibility of saying positively what in its
completeness it would be ?
376. We answer as follows. The whole question of
sacrificing one's own pleasure assumes a different aspect,
when the end for which it is to be sacrificed ■ is not an
addition to a general aggregate of pleasures, but the har-
imonious exercise of man's proper activities in some life rest-
ing on a self-sacrificing will. According to the latter view, the
individual's sacrifice of pleasure does not — as so much loss
of pleasure — come into the reckoning at all ; nor has any
balance to be attempted of unascertainable painsand pleasures
spreading over an indefinite range of sentient life. The good
to be sought is not made up of pleasures, nor the evil to be
avoided made up of pains. The end for which the sacrifice
is demanded is one which in the sacrifice itself is in some
measure attained — in some measure only, not fully, yet so
that the sacrifice is related to the complete end, not as a means
in itself valueless,, but as a constituent to a whole which
it helps to form. That realisation of the powers of the human
spirit, which we deem the true end, is not to be thought of
merely as something in a remote distance, towards which we
may take steps now, but in which there is no present partici-
pation. It is continuously going on, though in varying and
progressive degrees of completeness; and the individual's
sacrifice of an inclination, harmless or even in its way laud-
able, for the sake of a higher good, is itself already in some
measure an attainment of the higher good.
Thus, whereas according to any Hedonistic doctrine of
true good, though it be ' Universalistic ' Hedonism not
'Egoistic,' the certain present loss of pleasure to the indi-
en. ivj PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORIES 463
vidual himself and to his intimates, involved in sacrifices
of the kind we are considering, is so much deduction from
true good, only to be justified by a larger accession of
pleasure in other quarters or at other times — an accession
from the nature of the case less certain to the man medi-
tating the sacrifice than the loss — upon the other view,
while the loss of pleasure implied in the sacrifice to the
person who makes it, and to any others whom he can induce
willingly to accept any like loss that arises out of it for them,
is morally, or relatively to the true good, matter of indiffer-
ence, the exercise of a devoted will in the sacrifice, on the
part of all concerned in it, is an actual and undoubted con-
tribution to true good. The degree of its value will only be
doubtful, so far as there may be uncertainty in regard to its
tendency to yield more or less further good of the same kind
in the sequel. We say ' more or less,' for that it tends to
yield some further good of the same kind can never be really
doubtful. Self-sacrifice, devotion to worthy objects, is always
self-propagatory. If the question is asked, —
Of love that never found his earthly close,
What sequel ?
there is at least the answer,
But am I not the nobler through thy love?
O, three times less unworthy ' !
In like manner, upon the view that -of the life which forms
the true and full good the self-devoted will must be the
principle, if the question is asked. What comes of any
particular act of self-sacrifice? there is at least the answer
that the act does not need anything further to come of it,
in order to be in itself in little the good. But it is only if
we falter in that view of the good, on the strength of which
we give this answer, that we can doubt the beneficent result,
in whatever manner or degree, of the act in itself good. The
good will in one man has never failed to elicit or strengthen
such a will in another.
377. But it will be said that we are so far, dealing only in
' Tennyson's ' Luve and Duty.'
464 PRACTICAL VALVE OF MORAL THEORY [bK. IV
generalities. It may be admitted that an act or habit of
self-sacrifice is a good in itself, but there are many ways in
which a man may sacrifice himself, and he is resporisible for
choosing the most useful. It is of little profit to tdl him of
the intrinsic nobility of self-sacrifice, unless we can give him
some means of judging for what sort of objects he in parti-
cular should be prepared to give up his tastes and inclinations,
or to run the gauntlet of established custom. To revert to
one of the examples employed, no one would think of saying
absolutely that there was merit in sacrificing a taste for music
On the contrary, there may be a duty to cultivate it. The
question whether it should be sacrificed or cultivated must
-depend on the position and general capabilities of the in-
dividual, on the circumstances of his time, on the claims of
surrounding society. Some direction therefore is needed for
the individual in making his sacrifices; some criterion of
the ends which he should keep before him in decidirig for
this sacrifice rather than for that. How can the view of the
good for which we have been pleading afford such direction
or criterion ?
The answer lies in a consideration of that unity of the
human spirit throughout its individual manifestations, in
virtue of which the realisation of its possibilities, though
a personal object to each man, is at the same time an object
fully attainable by one only in so far as it is attained by the
whole human society. The statement that the act of self-
sacrifice has its value in itself is not to be understood as
denying that it has its value in its consequences, but as im-
plying that those consequences, to be of intrinsic value, must
be of a kind with the act itself, as an exercise of a character
having its dominant interest in some form of human perfection.
The injunction that would be founded on jthe view of that
perfection as the end would never be ' Sacrifice inclination '
\ simply, but ' Sacrifice inclination in so far as by so doing you
I may make men better ; ' but the bettering of men would
mean their advance in a goodness the same in principle as
that which appears in the sacrifice enjoined, and this sacrifice
itself would be regarded as already an instalment of the
CH. IV] PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORIES 465
good to be more largely attained in its consequences. The
direction to the individual, in doubt whether he should deny
himself some attractive pursuit or some harmless indulgence,
would be, not that he should make the sacrifice for the sake
of making it, but that he should be ready to make it, if upon
honest consideration it appear that men would be the better
for his doing so.
378. Universalistic Hedonism might give the same
direction ; but in the interpretation of the direction there
would be a great difference — a difference which might very
w^ell amount to that between demanding the sacrifice and
allowing the indulgence. The Hedonist, understanding by
the bettering of men an addition to the pleasures enjoyed
by them, present and to come, has at any rate an obscure
computation before him. In such cases as we are now con^
sidering he would not have the presumption, afforded by
a call of conventionally recognised duty, that obedience to
it, however painful to the individual, would be felicific in the
general result. The presumption from his point of view
must always be against the ' reasonableness ' of making the
sacrifice, till the probability of an excess of pleasure from its
ulterior consequences over the pain more immediately pro-
duced by it could be clearly made out. Such a probability
must generally be very difficult to arrive at. It does not at
all follow, as is apt to be assumed, because an observance
of conventional morality may be required in the interest of
general pleasure, that an advance upon conventional morality
is so. Upon the view that the exercise of a virtuous will is
an end in itself, the question about a possible ' too much '
of virtue cannot arise. But it is otherwise if an opposite
view is taken. If virtue is of value only as a means to
general pleasure, it becomes necessary to enquire what is the
degree of it which so contributes — to what extent an increase
in the number of self-devoted persons, and a more intense
and constant self-devotion on their part, is desirable, in order
to an increase in the sum of pleasures for all human, or all
sentient, beings. Thus in his forecast of the ' felicific ' results
to be looked for from any advance upon the ' law of opinion '
Hh
466 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV
in the way of self-denying virtue, the Hedonistic Utilitarian
may not avail himself of the short method that would be
represented by the maxim, 'The more virtue, the more
pleasure.' He may not assume that, because the suggested
self-denial would tend to increase virtue among men, it would
tend to increase pleasure. The pleasure-increasing tendency
must be made out on its own account ; and, unless the self-
denial in question is one that upon physiological evidence
can be proved likely in its consequences to cause some
decisive reduction in physical suffering, it is not easy to see
how this should be done. When it had been done, the
balance between the remoter and less certain gain and the
proximate loss would have still to be struck. Upon such
principles the case against making the 'uncalled for' sacrifice,
even though dispassionately conducted, would generally be
invincibly strong.
379. From the other point of view, even though the
precise nature and strength of the call for the sacrifice
could not clearly be made out, the presumption would
still be in favour of its being made, on the ground of the
intrinsic value attaching alike to the exercise of the self-
denying character, and to those results, of a kind with
itself, which through the influence of example it is sure
to produce among men. It is true that this general
presumption will not help a man to decide which of many
particular courses of self-denying action, which it is open
to him to pursue but which he would not be thought the
worse of for not pursuing, is the one which it is best for
him to pursue. It is his duty not to waste himself among
various efforts, each of which might be well-intentioned and
involve real self-denial, but none of them in the direction
in which he in particular under the circumstances of the
case "might do most good. For deciding, however, whether
any particular sacrifice is one that he ought to make, he has
much more available guidance, according to our view, than
a computation of the total range of pleasures and pains to
be looked for as a consequence of the sacrifice. He has to
ask, according to the terms in which the question has been
CH. iv] PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORIES 467
above put, whether the suggested sacrifice on his part is one
by which he may best contribute to the well-being of society,
' as measured by the more general establishment of condi-
tions favourable to the attainment of the recognised virtues
and excellences, by the more general attainment of those
excellences in some degree, or by their attainment on the
part of some persons in higher degree without detraction
from the opportunities of others.' It is not to be disguised,
of course, that with such an end before him as this question
represents, he may find it difficult to ascertain, by analysis
of circumstances and enquiry into facts, in what degree the
various forms of self-denying activity open to him are likely
to contribute to the end. As has already been pointed out,
such analysis and enquiry are not to be dispensed with upon
one theory of the end any more than upon another. The
question is of the object with reference tOAvhich the analysis
and enquiry are to be conducted ; whether in order to ascer-
tain tendencies to produce a maximum of pleasure over all
■time to all beings capable of it, or in order to ascertain ten-
-dencies to produce a perfection of human society, resting on
the universal prevalence of the will to be perfect. When
the point at issue is whether some sacrifice should be made
which is uncalled for by social converition, while its tendency
in the former direction will generally be found unascertain-
able, its tendency in the latter will be within the ken of any
dispassionate and considerate man.
380. A man asks himself — to revert once more to that
instance — whether he is justified in giving so much of his
time to the gratification of his taste for music ; which must
mean, whether there are not claims upon him for the service
of mankind which cannot be satisfied while he does so.
JNew it may really be a difficult question for him to settle
.whether he cannot serve mankind more effectually by giving
more of his time to music rather than less. It is a question
ior the settlement of which there" may be needed careful
analysis of his own faculties, of the needs of society about
him, of his particular opportunities and powers of meeting
those needs ; Vnd in settling it the truest conception of ulti-
H h 2
468 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bK. IV
mate good will not prevent the mistakes to which hastiness,
prejudice, and self-conceit naturally lead. Still there is all
the diiiference between approaching the question with some
definite conception of the claims of mankind, of the good
to be sought for them, and without any such conception.
The Hedonistic theory, as we have tried to show, affords no
such conception. It insists indeed on the claim of every
man to have as much pleasure as is compatible with the at-
tainment of the greatest possible amount on the whole, but
this claim cannot be translated into a claim to be or to do,
or to have the chance of being or doing, anything in par-
ticular. We cannot found upon it even a claim of every
man to be free ; for who can be sure that the freedom of
all men, when the whole range of the possibilities of plea-
sure is taken into account, tends to an excess of pleasure
over pain ? Still less can we found upon it a claim of every
one to be helped to be good, according to our present stan-
dard of goodness. Hedonistic theory can only bid us pro-
mote the received virtues and excellences among men with
an ^ which makes the injunction of no avail in such a case
as we are considering. They are to be promoted up to the
limit at which their promotion still certainly yields more
pleasure than pain to the universe of human or sentient
beings ; and it is impossible to say what this limit is.
It is otherwise when the exercise of the recognised virtues
and excellences, as resting upon a self-devoted will or will to
be perfect, is considered to be an end in itself — to be itself,
if not in completeness yet in principle and essence, the ulti-
mate good for man. The general nature of the claim of other
men upon him is plain to every one who contemplates it with
reference to such an end. It is a claim for service in the
direction of making the attainment of those virtues and
excellences, by some persons and in some form, more possible.
The question for the individual will still remain, how he in
particular may best render this service, and it may be one of
much difficulty. He may easily deceive himself in answering
it, but he will not have the excuse for answering it in favour of
his own inclination, which is afforded by reference to a ' Sum-
CH. ivj PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORIES 469
mum Bonum ' of which the most readily ascertainable con-
stituent must always be his own pleasure.
381. As to the particular instance we have been consider-
ing, while intrinsic value will not be denied to excellence
in music as having a place in the fulfilment of man's voca-
tion, it is a question, so to speak, of spiritual proportion,
whether the attainment of such excellence is of importance
in any society of ftien under the given conditions of that
society. For, like all excellence in art, it has its value as
an element in a whole of spiritual life, to which the moral
virtues are essential; which without them would be no
realisation of the capacities of the human soul. In some
Italian principality of the last century, for instance, with its
civil life crushed out and its moral energies debased, ex-
cellence in music could hardly be accounted of actual and
present value at all. Its value would be potential, in so far
as the artist's work might survive to become an element in
a nobler life elsewhere or at a later time. Under such con-
ditions much occupation with music might imply indifference
to claims of the human soul which must be satisfied in order
to the attainment of a life in which the value of music could
be actualised. And under better social conditions there may
be claims, arising from the particular position of an indivi-
dual, which render the pursuit of excellence in music, though
it would be the right pursuit for others qualified as he is,
a wrong one for him. In the absence of such claims the
main question will be of his particular talent. Has he talent
to serve mankind — to contribute to the perfection of the
human soul — more as a musician than in any other way ?
Only if he has will he be justified in making music his main
pursuit. If he is not to make it his main pursuit, the ques-
tion will remain, to what extent he may be justified in in-
dulging his taste for it, either as a refreshment of faculties
which are to be mainly used in other pursuits — to be so used,
because in them he may best serve mankind in the sense
explained — or as enabling him to share in that intrinsically
valuable lifting up of the soul which music may afford.
382. Such questions are not to be answered by ' intui-
47° PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY
tipn,' nor do they arise under conditions under which our
guidance in duty needs to be intuitive — needs to be derived
from convictioris which afford immediate direction indepen-
dently of any complicated consideration of circumstances.
They only arise for persons who have exceptional opportunity
of directing their own pursuits, and who do not need to be
in a hurry in their decisions. To most people sufiScient
direction for their pursuits is afforded by claims so well
established in conventional morality that they are intuitively
recognised^ and that a conscience merely responsive to social
disapprobation would reproach us for neglecting them. For
all of us it is so in regard to a great part of our lives. But
the cases we have been considering are those in which some
'counsel of perfection' is needed, which reference, to such
claims does not supply, and which has to be darived from
reference to a theory of ultimate good. In such cases many
questions have to be answered, which intuition cannot answer,
before the issue is arrived at to which the theory of ultimate
good becomes applicable; but then the cases only occur for
persons who have leisure and faculty for dealing with such
questions. For them the essential thing is that their theory
of the good should afford a really available criterion for
estimating those further claims upon them which are not en-
forced by the sanction of conventional morality, and a criterion
which affords no plea to the self-indulgent impulse. Our
point has been to show, in the instance given, that such
a criterion is afforded by the theory of ultimate good as a per-
fection of the human spirit resting on the will to be perfept
(which may be called in short the theory of virtfle as an. .end
in itself), but not by the theory of good as consisting in
a maximum of possible pleasure, .-
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